Amazon Web Services (AWS) has built an unassailable lead over the rest of the cloud computing industry and will set the agenda for hosting for some years to come, according to a lecturer who addressed the British Computer Society (BCS) recently.

Speaking exclusively to Datacenter Dynamics, open source cloud computing company Reconnix’s CTO Steve Nice said AWS is so far ahead of the OpenStack community of vendors that few developers or end users have the confidence to invest time in exploring their open source options.

“At the moment, all the big vendors behind OpenStack seem to have no answer to Amazon web services,” Nice said.

In July, Nice addressed an audience of 40 BCS members at the society’s London headquarters in a briefing entitled “OpenStack and the Future of Open Source Cloud.”

Audience members included developers and strategists from VISA, BUPA and the BBC.

However, despite enthusiasm for the concepts of open source, many of the audience showed few indications that they would risk embarking on an open source development of cloud computing solutions.

“They all sound keen, but the people I speak to wouldn’t want to embrace OpenStack yet,” Nice said.

Many developers are failing to get to grips with the concepts involved in writing systems for the cloud, he said.

“At the talk, the reaction I got was that many of them are struggling to understand that, with the cloud, you write applications to run on servers that won’t necessarily be around,” Nice said.

The lack of cloud-centric application awareness could indicate that most developers and end users aren’t yet at a stage where they could be easily helped into an OpenStack project.

“At the end of the talk, all the questions were about this concept and we eventually had to stop taking the questions,” Nice said.

“The central concept behind cloud application development, that the applications now dictate the computing environment they want, instead of the other way around, is such a reverse for many IT departments that they struggle to accept it.”

They are not alone, according to Nice, since the likes of HP, Dell and Cisco have also been left behind by Amazon.

“The big players did realize that something was going on, but lots of events conspired to give Amazon its lead and it’s going to be difficult for anyone to catch up,” Nice said.