AWS introduced AWS Public Data Set back in 2008. It later evolved into Registry of Open Data on AWS and now, AWS Data Exchange looks like the next step forward.
AWS Data Exchange is an excellent addition to the AWS Marketplace which contains 1,000 licensable data products to over 80 data providers. It has a catalogue of free and paid offerings, in categories such as financial services, mapping, weather, and healthcare.
How AWS Fares With Its Competitors
Here are a few significant differences before the introduction of AWS Data Exchange:
AWS vs Azure
AWS and Azure are the two giants in the cloud computing world. If you are new to the cloud computing area, then the first two names you will hear are AWS and Azure.
If an organisation requires Platform as a service (PaaS) provider and Windows integration, then Azure would be the preferable choice. If an enterprise is looking for Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) provider and a variety of tools, then AWS can be a better choice.
- AWS is friendly with open source models from the beginning, whereas Azure has not had a good relationship with the open-source community.
- Because of its good relationship with the government, it has better offers on government cloud. Azure has a limited reach when it comes to government cloud offerings.
- AWS has yet to strengthen its support to hybrid clouds. Azure excels in hybrid cloud space organisation.
- AWS has a flexible price range compared to Azure while some think AWS is still expensive.
AWS vs Google Cloud Platform
When it comes to market share, Google is faraway at the third place at 8% whereas AWS is at 33% and Azure is at 16%.
AWS’s service usage is by account. GCP organises service usage by projects rather than accounts.
One of the main reasons why AWS topples the competition is that it invests heavily in data centres and solution. GCP doesn’t have as many global centres.
With Amazon introducing AWS Data Exchange, it has made it easy for data providers and customers to exchange data. AWS continues to grow and is one of the main drivers in Amazon’s growth, but to a lesser degree than in the past. In its quarterly report, Amazon revealed that cloud computing accounts for 13% of the revenue of its quarter and growing 45% in sales to $9 billion.
The Need For AWS Data Exchange
Enterprises, researchers and educational institutions working on AWS have been asking for an easier way to find, subscribe and integrate various data sets into the applications, analytics and machine learning models because the way we exchange data hasn’t evolved for around 20 years.
They have been using third party data for a long time to conduct research, analytics, train machine learning models, and make data-driven decisions.
But as these customers use more third-party data they have to wait for weeks to receive shipped physical media, manage sensitive FTPs, wait for updates or code several APIs.
These inconsistent methods force customers to build and maintain automation to have up to date third party data in the data lakes, applications, analytics and machine learning models that they migrate to AWS. Customers then have to manage to bill with a separate data provider.
For a data provider, it becomes a challenge to reach every customer who is interested in their data. It is also technologically challenging to store, deliver, bill and entitled data for the customers.
AWS Data Exchange gives customers the ability to integrate third-party data into workloads quickly they’re migrating to the clouds.
AWS Data Exchange makes it possible for a customer to select from a third-party data source in the AWS Marketplace. When a customer subscribes, they can use the AWS Data Exchange API or console to guide it directly to Amazon Simple Storage Services (Amazon S3).
But, what about the revisions? No need to worry, whenever the data provider publishes a revision, it is notified via a CloudWatch event so that the revision propagates to applicable data lakes, apps and AI models.
How AWS Plans To Go Forward
AWS Data Exchange has a restriction on what sort of data can be made available to customers. For subscribed customers, there is no cost when the customer asks the data providers to deliver the existing subscription using AWS Data Exchange.
Whereas, the data providers can publish free or paid products under specified terms. They can also issue private offers with custom terms to specific AWS customers.
AWS Data Exchange aims to deliver daily, weekly and monthly reports detailing subscription activity to providers and sensitive data such as that of health care is restricted.
“Being a provider for AWS Data Exchange enables companies to directly access Foursquare’s audiences and places datasets — which is derived from our understanding of 220 million unique consumers, 100 million devices, and 60 million global commercial venues — in order to strengthen customer intelligence, build context-rich applications, and assess category & chain trends,” said Josh Cohen, senior VP, Foursquare, speaking about AWS Data Exchange.
