AWS Now Verizon's 'Preferred Cloud Provider'

Verizon is going all in with Amazon Web Services by making the world's largest public cloud its preferred cloud provider. The telecom giant announced this morning that it's migrating over 1,000 business-critical applications and database backend systems to AWS. The move will include pushing production databases to Amazon Aurora, AWS’s proprietary but MySQL-based relational database service.

The announcement comes just weeks after the former Baby Bell announced that Oath, a Verizon subsidiary formed in 2017 following the telco's acquisitions of AOL and Yahoo!, had selected AWS as its cloud of choice. That decision evidently wasn't a difficult one, as many of Oath's properties, including AOL, HuffPost, and Tumblr, were already running on AWS, along with key segments of its advertising businesses.

"AWS’s innovative technologies have been very beneficial as we have grown our public cloud footprint over the years, and that is why we’ve chosen to expand our strategic relationship,” Atte Lahtiranta, Oath's CTO, said in a statement at the time.

Verizon has a history with AWS that dates back to 2015 and before this move had several business and consumer applications running in Amazon's cloud. That relationship began about a year before it shuttered it's own public cloud, built on the infrastructure of Terremark, which it bought for $1.4 billion in 2011.

According to Verizon, the current wholesale move to AWS is part of a corporate-wide initiative to increase agility and reduce costs through the use of cloud computing.

"We are making the public cloud a core part of our digital transformation, upgrading our database management approach to replace our proprietary solutions with Amazon Aurora," Mahmoud El-Assir, Verizon's SVP of Global Technology Services, said in a statement. "Working with AWS complements our focus on efficiency, speed, and innovation within our engineering culture, and has enabled us to quickly deliver the best, most efficient customer experiences."

The company said it has also invested in building AWS-specific training facilities, called "dojos," where employees can quickly get up to speed on AWS technologies and learn how to innovate with speed and at scale.

Inking this deal is certainly beneficial to AWS. Although the company has a commanding lead in the public cloud market, rivals Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and others have been doubling down on their efforts to increase market share during a period when late-to-the-cloud enterprises are beginning to move away from traditional stand-alone data center models to adopt hybrid cloud approaches. During the last year or so, its two largest rivals have seen year-over-year gains against AWS.

"We look forward to continuing our work with Verizon as their preferred public cloud provider, helping them to continually transform their business and innovate on behalf of their customers," Mike Clayville, AWS's VP of Worldwide Commercial Sales, said in a statement. "The combination of Verizon's team of builders with AWS's extensive portfolio of cloud services and expertise means that Verizon's options for delighting their customers is virtually unlimited."