‘There is hardly any reluctance in moving core apps to the cloud’

—Dr Werner Vogels CTO, Amazon

As cloud continues to gain widespread acceptance among enterprises in India, cloud service providers are looking at increasing their presence and marketshare in the Indian market. Dr Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer, Amazon, the man driving the technology behind Amazon Web Services was in India recently and Voice&Data caught up with him for a chat. Excerpts:

Voice&Data:

Even as cloud continues to gather popularity and a lot of companies look at moving workloads to the cloud, the core applications still remain away from the cloud. What is the challenge you see here?

Dr Werner Vogels:

First of all, I don’t see a reluctance to move the core apps to the cloud. There is a wide spread business of moving the core SAP or Oracle applications on top of AWS. So, I am not really seeing a reluctance to move the core apps to the cloud.

But, what I do see sometimes is some architectural challenges in moving some of these apps to the cloud because they were not built for being elastic or highly available. So, lifting and shifting some of these things will give you some financial benefits, but it doesn’t give you the operational excellence benefits. So, while you can migrate them, they don’t become a super scalable cloud application.

Voice&Data:

cloud apps?

Because they aren’t native

Dr Werner Vogels:

Yes. So, you can move them. But, it’s not a matter that these apps can’t run on the cloud, it is if you can get all the benefits that cloud offers you. There needs to be a RoI. Even when we look at Amazon.com, there are a few pieces that still haven’t moved over to AWS purely because they are tied to a particular architecture that we had in mind. Lifting and shifting them to AWS wouldn’t have delivered much RoI.

Voice&Data:

CIOs are also bothered about the ability or possibility to move their workload from one public cloud to

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