Amazon Opening Pop-Up Stores for Cloud Business

Amazon (AMZN) plans to open brick-and-mortar stores pointed at familiarizing developers with its Amazon Web Services (AWS) business, as the online retailer looks for new ways to compete with rivals Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) for cloud services sales.

Ariel Kelman, AWS Worldwide Marketing vice president, said Amazon will kick off the initiative by reopening a “pop-up loft” that it operated in San Francisco for about a month earlier this year. Amazon will use that same model and format to open additional stores in other geographies, Kelman told Bloomberg.

Amazon staffers at both the San Francisco outlet and in future locations will be on hand to help developers address questions and issues or direct them to free technical classes. Amazon will have around 10 employees onsite at the San Francisco location.

While not specifying the number of pop-ups Amazon intends to open, Kelman said they will be situated to map to hot spots for startups.

“We’re also going to be looking to expand to do other pop-up lofts in other parts of the world,” Kelman said. “If you look at the areas of concentrations of startups, every one of those top cities are on our lists.”

As for the soon-to-be reopened San Francisco AWS loft, it reportedly can house up to 400 people and is suitable for events or as a meeting place for developers to socialize with one another and the AWS community. According to Kelman, Amazon figures “several thousand people a month” will frequent the outlet.

Separately, Amazon said late last that its AWS platform has been granted provisional authorization from the Defense Information Systems Agency to hold Defense Department data at security impact levels 3 – 5. AWS previously received a DoD Provisional Authorization for security impact levels 1 – 2. Amazon’s GovCloud now is the first cloud service to hold every level of unclassified DOD data.

Teresa Carlson, Amazon Global Public Sector vice president, told FedScoop that the authorization enables the DoD to run any non-classified workload on the cloud.