Amazon Web Services (AWS ) seems to
have the Midas touch. Seemingly
everything the Seattle bookseller’s cloud
infrastructure division introduces ends up
being category-leading. That’s awesome
for Amazon but pretty horrid for all those
left in the wake of the juggernaut. The
latest (and, admittedly, entirely natural)
area for AWS to introduce product in is
the burgeoning Mobile Backend as a
Service (MBaaS) area. Essentially all these
tools aim to help mobile developers move
on from reinventing the wheel. Instead of
having to rebuild core mobile
functionality for every single application,
MBaaS lets developers abstract the
“undifferentiated heavy lifting” or in
other words the stuff that they have to do
that adds no real value to the app.
I spent some time taking a briefing on the
offering with the head of the MBaaS
product team, Jinesh Varia. As an aside,
only 12 months ago analyst briefings and
NDA advice of product announcements
from AWS were completely unheard of.
AWS has, in that time, built up an
excellent analyst relations team. While
this is a small part of truly becoming an
enterprise vendor, it is a critical part of
the process. It’s refreshing to see AWS
move in this direction. Anyway, on to the
announcement......
www.schoolmeout.com
Varia told me that, like other AWS
products, the development team has been
driven by observing how their customers
were utilizing AWS’ services. Obviously a
vast number of developers building upon
AWS use a number of different solutions
to create mobile applications. AWS
noticed a significant amount of reworking
whereby customers would have to spend
time and effort recreating the same basic
building blocks for their applications.
AWS is in the habit of giving developers
tools to remove these basic jobs from
their workflow and in doing so allows
them to focus on key deliverables.
Removing the “undifferentiated heavy
lifting” as AWS loves to say.
There are three key announcements in
terms of the MBaaS product offering:
Amazon Cognito, Amazon Mobile
Analytics and Amazon SNS Mobile Push.
Looking at each of these in turn:
Amazon Cognito fills the identity
management and authorization, data
synchronization and offline access
problem spaces. The identity and access
management components are currently
integrated with Facebook , Google
GOOGL -0.29% + and Amazon itself. In
terms of cross-device and cross platform
sync, Cognito enables offline support by
storing data in an SQLLite local database
when no connectivity exists. When
connectivity is restored, data sync
happens back to the cloud. Finally, and in
an interesting twist, AWS allows for
unauthenticated identities in order to
help create a better user experience and
easier on boarding. Another benefit of
unauthenticated access is that it provides
opportunities for connected devices (as
opposed to connected users) to access
cloud services.
Amazon analytics is an analytical service
designed for mobile and powered by
AWS’ other analytics platforms. It
generates rapid reports and enables
reports to be generated across millions of
individual users. In a comment that can
only be seen as a thinly veiled barb at
Google, AWS points out that its analytics
service does not aggregate user data and
hence the customers have sole, unfettered
access to their own data. The analytics
come with a host of standard measures
that are useful to developers, Monthly
Active Users, Daily Active Users, Daily
Sessions, Average Revenue etc. Users can
also track custom event types.
Finally AWS is introducing SNS Mobile
Push. Using the product, developers or
their applications can send push
notifications seamlessly across multiple
platforms globally. SNS Push works across
iOS, Android, Kindle Fire and Windows
platforms.
In terms of pricing, Cognito is free for less
than one million syncs per month with
10GB of storage, although this is limited
to new customers only and only for a 12
months period. Mobile Analytics is free
for 100 million events per month and SNS
Mobile Push is free for one million push
message per month. Paid plans are
available for higher requirements but this
generous free tier is an indication that
AWS sees this more as a way to keep
people on its platform than it is to
generate meaningful incremental revenue.
I did have some questions about the
offering. Firstly, where are the native
integrations with different location-based
services? Location is a key value
proposition of mobile apps and I’d have
liked to have seen something location
based here. I also suspect that a
significant proportion of AWS’ customers
would respond well to a packaged rather
than componentized MBaaS offering –
while AWS prides itself on offering
everything as a module, MBaaS is one
area that a more packaged offering makes
sense. This was a theme that Staves
Sridhar, CEO of MBaaS vendor Kinvey
reiterated when he said that:
Indeed. Notwithstanding any competitive
landscape issues, these offerings are yet
another compelling driver for AWS to
gain new, and keep existing, customers.
It’s hard to compete with someone so
crazily successful as the Amazon
powerhouse.
www.schoolmeout.com


source http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2014/07/10/amazon-picks-mobile-development-as-its-new-product-category-to-dominate/