BANGALORE, INDIA: Andy Jassy, senior VP, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Amazon Infrastructure, talks to CIOL about his thoughts on cloud adoption in India and what he thinks about private, public and hybrid cloud terminologies and competition. Excerpts:

CIOL: Are you happy with the kind of adoption of cloud in India?

Andy Jassy: I am very happy with the way cloud adoption in India is going for AWS. It is already one of the largest countries in the world in terms of adoption. There are quite a few, very impressive and interesting enterprise and start-up use cases. NDTV has put five of its national stations over AWS and also run content management systems on top of AWS. Hungama runs 80 per cent of their applications on AWS and similarly does redBus.

Also Read: India showing strong inclination towards private cloud

We have a large number of Indian customers and it is growing very rapidly. In terms of potential workload and applications, there are some who can be satisfied or served well with the 60 to 80 millisecond latency from Singapore to India. That group of applications is quite large.

In the United States, the latency from the East Coast to West Coast is about 80 milliseconds. And majority of our US customers use our East Coast Region and yet latency is about 80 milliseconds.

However, there are other workloads that won’t tolerate that latency and need lower latency than that or have regulatory reasons why they need to or want to keep data inside the country. It will be harder to get those workloads on our platforms until we have a presence here.

CIOL: What is your take on the private, hybrid, and public cloud buzz?

Andy Jassy: There is a bit of confusion about it. We find all those terms such as private cloud, public clouds, hybrid clouds, infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, are kind of overloaded and confusing terms. Primarily because we never had a customer who came to us and say, 'I want an IaaS product, or can you give me a hybrid product?'.

What customers are looking for is a way to solve a problem and over time we are already starting to see this happen. Moreover, over time all of those lines that people think are so neat today are completely blurring.

If you look at why cloud adoption is so hot, it has nothing to do with the term 'cloud', and has everything to do with the benefits that this platform provides:

First you can turn capital expense into a variable expense. You do not have to lay out capital upfront for servers and for data centres. You only pay for what you use, and that what you pay (the variable expense) is lower when compared to the companies who pay and do it on their own, because we have so much scale that we often pass on cost savings to our customers.