6 Ways Amazon Web Services Does Things Differently From 'Old Guard' Enterprise Vendors

1. Simple Building Blocks

Enterprise vendors sometimes make their products and services more complex than they need to be. Some are obsessed with bundling products into suites and pitching them to customers as cost-saving mechanisms.

AWS set out from the beginning to keep its cloud infrastructure services as simple as possible, according to Jassy. "We wanted to build highly flexible, feature-poor, primitive building blocks," he told CRN in mid-July.

Some enterprise vendors want customers to use their products and services in certain ways, and construct them accordingly. But AWS decided it would be best to offer basic services and let customers figure out what to do with them, according to Jassy.

"We didn't want to make those decisions for developers; we wanted them to be able to stitch them together however they saw fit," Jassy said.