Thought Leadership

Teamcenter X and AWS provide a broad infrastructure in the cloud

By Blake Snodgrass
Chris Pennington
Global Industry Marketing Leader for Industrial Machinery at Siemens Digital Industries Software

The PLM for Machine Builders podcast series is pleased to revisit our second podcast episode, focusing on Teamcenter X industry solutions in the cloud. Our podcast is hosted by Chris Pennington, Global Industry Marketing Leader for Industrial Machinery at Siemens Digital Industries Software, interviewing Joe Rosing, WW GTM Leader, Industrial Manufacturing at AWS, discussing new perspectives on how cloud technology is changing the product development process and business operations. 

>Listen to the podcast.

Joe Rosing
Joe Rosing, WW GTM Leader, Industrial Manufacturing at AWS

AWS, or Amazon Web Services, architects, builds, deploys, and manages websites, apps, and processes to be the most flexible and secure via a cloud computing environment, making security a top priority.

What is AWS?

At its core, AWS is built to ensure the security requirements of the military, global banks, and high-sensitivity organizations. Additionally, it uses secure hardware and software, building and operating regions and service offerings that are supply-vetted and accepted as safe for confidential information, benefitting global customers.

Malintent can find a server anywhere, whether in the cloud or not. Therefore, AWS has a dedicated team of engineers and investigators that proactively build algorithms and mechanisms to detect and prevent service misuse. They respond rapidly when customers or third parties bring suspected abuse to their attention.

AWS’ scale allows significantly more investment in security policing and countermeasures. In small and medium-sized businesses, that’s more than most large companies could afford. Indeed, when CIOs worry about a rogue server under a developer’s desk running something destructive, AWS and CIOs can use AWS Config tools and resource tagging to focus on cloud assets their company is using at any time.

Many companies use UPS devices that provide resilience for on-premises solutions. AWS is responsible for the resiliency of the cloud, which means a robust infrastructure that runs all AWS services. This infrastructure comprises the hardware, software, networking, and facilities that run AWS cloud services. The AWS Global cloud infrastructure enables customers to build highly resilient workload architectures.

Each AWS region is wholly isolated and consists of multiple availability zones. These zones isolate faults that might impact workload resilience, preventing them from affecting other regional zones. Simultaneously, all zones in an AWS region are interconnected with high bandwidth, low latency networking over a fully redundant dedicated fiber between the availability zones. Then, all traffic between zones is encrypted with sufficient network performance.

When an application is divided across multiple availability zones, companies are better isolated and protected from power outages, lightning strikes, tornadoes, hurricanes and more. The strength of AWS’ reliability is the ability of a workload to perform its expected function correctly and consistently.

Its design principles can include:

  • Automatically recovering from failure.
  • Scaling horizontally to increase aggregate workload availability.
  • Stopping the guessing at capacity, especially for small and mid-sized businesses.

This last principle addresses a common cause of failure and on-premises workloads: resource saturation when the demands placed on a workload exceed the capacity of that workload in the cloud. You can then monitor demand and workload utilization and automate the addition or removal of resources to maintain an optimal level to satisfy demand without under-provisioning.

Moving to the cloud

AWS allows customers:

  • To quickly spin up resources as they need them. The result is that manufacturers can quickly develop and roll out new applications while teams experiment and innovate more rapidly and frequently. If an experiment fails, you can always de-provision these resources without risk. 
  • To trade capital expense for variable expense and only pay for it as they consume it. The variable expense is much lower than what small and mid-size businesses can typically provide for themselves. Because of our economies of scale, this is primarily aligned with manufacturers – moving fixed costs to variable costs is vital to keeping the operating model flexible relative to demand.
  • To ensure they have enough capacity to handle their business operations at the peak activity level. With AWS, they can provide what they need, knowing that they can instantly scale up or down within the needs of their business.
  • To innovate faster via the cloud because they can focus their precious resources on developing and executing applications or use cases with operational improvement in differentiation for their customers, not spending much time on undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing the IT infrastructure and the data centers for on-premises systems.
  • To enable manufacturers to deploy globally in minutes. AWS’ cloud infrastructure is the concept of a region that is a physical location worldwide with clustered data centers. AWS now spans 96 availability zones within 30 geographic regions worldwide, and we’ve announced plans for 15 more availability zones and five more AWS regions.

As a result, when small to mid-sized businesses either need to scale deployment or grow their global footprint, they can do this quickly on AWS.

Learn more in the podcast.


Siemens Xcelerator, the comprehensive and integrated portfolio of software and services from Siemens Digital Industries Software, helps companies of all sizes create and leverage a comprehensive digital twin that provides organizations with new insights, opportunities and levels of automation to drive innovation.

For more information on Siemens Digital Industries Software products and services, visit siemens.com/software or follow us on LinkedInTwitterFacebook and Instagram. Siemens Digital Industries Software – where today meets tomorrow.

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/thought-leadership/2023/10/25/teamcenter-x-and-aws-provide-a-broad-infrastructure-in-the-cloud/