Hybrid and hybrid infrastructure are not defined in stone, but rather the meaning of these terms and the cloud services that bear their name are being innovated upon and reinvented quickly, according to Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Andy Jassy. 

Hybrid cloud is typically viewed as a mix of modes, having been “defined early on as a combination of cloud alongside on-premises data centers,” but that framework was largely popularized by vendors that sell on-premises infrastructure products that “wanted to ride along with the momentum of the cloud,” he said during his opening keynote at AWS re:Invent 2020.

That foundation “led to all this breathless debate about whether this was going to turn out to be a binary situation. Would you only use the cloud, or only use on-premises?” Jassy said.

AWS is at least partially at fault for that confusion, he admitted, because it strongly believes that “the vast majority of companies in the fullness of time will not have their own data centers, and those that do will have much smaller footprints.” The company’s level of confidence in that prediction has grown stronger during the last few years, but the key caveat is that it always expected that to play out over many years, he said. 

Reflecting on the early days of hybrid infrastructure, Jassy said AWS was primarily focused on building the cloud-specific pieces while multiple companies tried to claim ownership of the hybrid mantle by building “hugely hyped capabilities that were supposed to be hybrid capabilities. They never lived up to the hype and really never got any traction.” 

That’s when he and his team at AWS “went back to first principles,” as he put it, asking themselves questions like: What really is hybrid? What does on-premises mean? Is it just on-premises data centers? Does that same designation apply to a restaurant and an agricultural field? It probably shouldn’t because those businesses and many others have very different requirements than on-premises data centers, he said. 

That dialogue and ongoing development within AWS led to a more broad and flexible definition of sorts. “We think of hybrid infrastructures, including the cloud along with various other edge nodes — on-premises data centers being one of them, but there are several,” Jassy said.

“The way that customers have told us they want to consume our hybrid offering is with the same APIs, the same control plane, the same tools, and the same hardware that they're used to using in AWS regions. Effectively, they want us to distribute AWS to these various edge nodes,” he said. “So we reimagined for ourselves what hybrid was and we started to build solutions that picked off the biggest use cases, but in a way that works for customers both short and long term.

Following that is what Jassy described as a “very unusual collaboration” with VMware that lead to the creation of VMware Cloud on AWS, a service that allows enterprises to use the same VMware tools they’ve been using to manage on-premises infrastructure to now manage their infrastructure in AWS.

“There’s no other managed service that VMware runs with another cloud provider. There’s none that have the functionality and capability of this VMware Cloud on AWS,” he said. “It's not just that both VMware and AWS have its engineering teams and its product teams closely tied to the hip, but also our field teams and our partner teams work together with customers. It's a very unusual partnership, and it's gaining a lot of momentum and a lot of steam.”

VMware Cloud on AWS is used by S&P Global, Freddie Mac, Johnson & Johnson, Philips, Palantir Technologies, the Scottish government, and many others. The number of edge nodes powered by the services is almost doubling year over year, according to Jassy.

Efforts like that have helped propel and keep AWS at the front of the hyperscaler pack with a business that is currently running at a $46 billion revenue run rate and growing 29% year over year, he noted. 

Jassy cut deeper into those numbers, particularly the annual growth rate to underline the continued strength that AWS believes it has over its competitors. “A lot of people sometimes get confused and they try to compare different companies’ year-over-year growth rate. The year-over-year growth rate percentage only matters as it relates to the base revenue,” he said. 

“To grow to a $46 billion revenue run rate with 29% year-over-year growth meant we had to grow an incremental $10 billion in the last 12 months to get there. That is much larger than you’ll see elsewhere in the cloud,” he said.

“It took us 123 months, a little over 10 years, to grow to a $10 billion business,” Jassy said. “And it took us only 23 months to go from $10 billion to $20 billion, 13 months to go from $20 billion to $30 billion, and then 12 months to go from $30 billion to $40 billion. So the rate of growth in AWS continues to accelerate.”