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Amazon’s current AWS region map.

Updated below with video of the talk.

Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy, in his first public comments since being named to that position in April, outlined his ambitions for the future of Amazon’s cloud platform during a talk at an AWS event in Washington, D.C., this morning.

Andy Jassy, AWS CEO, speaking via webcast this morning.
Andy Jassy, AWS CEO, speaking via webcast this morning.

“If you look at the amount of capability today from where we were when we started 10 years ago, it’s just night and day,” he said, noting that Amazon Web Services will launch close to 1,000 new services and features this year alone, up from 70 in its first year. “And yet, we still feel like we’re at the relative beginning.”

It’s not quite as succinct as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ favorite refrain, “It’s Still Day 1,” but the sentiment is the same, and it’s all the more notable given Amazon’s leadership position in the cloud. AWS posted $7.8 billion in net sales and $1.8 billion in operating profit last year, helping to fuel the e-commerce giant’s broader technology ambitions.

Jassy, speaking on stage with AWS VP Teresa Carlson, cited geographic expansion of Amazon Web Services data centers as one key area for growth. The company currently offers 12 AWS regions around the world, with five more planned for this year. “I think you should expect to see a lot more geographic expansion from us in the coming years. I think virtually every Tier 1 country will have an AWS region.”

Amazon is widely recognized as the leading public cloud platform, but the company faces increasingly strong competition from Microsoft, Google and others in providing cloud services to developers and companies.

In terms of technology, Jassy said he expects people to use smaller units of computing over time. For example, more companies are using containers to deploy apps, and Amazon’s EC2 container service is “growing like gangbusters,” he said. Another area of growth will be serverless computing, currently exemplified by AWS Lamda, using a line or two of script to trigger an event, such as automatic resizing of photos.

Databases are also changing, he said.Amazon is carving out its position in databases with its Aurora database, which Jassy described as the fastest-growing service in the history of AWS.

“You’re going to get a lot more database freedom, everybody, than you’ve had the last 20 years,” Jassy  said. “People have been locked in to these old-guard, commercial-grade databases and they’ve been trying to move as fast as they can to open-source editions like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB … To get the same performance in those open editions as you can get in the commercial grade databases, it’s doable, it’s hard though.”

He also highlighted data analytics, machine learning and the Internet of Things. “There are millions of sensors, all over our homes, all over our workplaces, in oil fields, everywhere, and these are small devices, and the smaller the device the less CPU and the less disk they have, and the more important the cloud becomes.”

Jassy cited Amazon’s existing IoT efforts but said the company is “at the very start of what’s going to be available for customers.”

Update, June 22: Here’s the full video of Jassy’s talk.

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