Alex Iskold is reporting live from ETech 2007
Werner Vogels, VP and CTO of Amazon.com, took
the ETech stage to discuss the challenges in building a large-scale, reliable web infrastructure.
Amazon spent a decade and a whopping $2 billion dollars to build the world class technology that powers their web sites.
Today Amazon makes available their own infrastructure to the anyone, via Amazon Web
Services. We have extensively analyzed
Amazon Web Services, as well as companies that are already
leveraging
it in their businesses.
Why build on Amazon Web Services? Vogels said because there are compelling business and technical advantages:
Amazon is rapidly moving to build a new kind of infrastructure, one that can really be considered a new WebOS. The stack of services offered by Amazon today is quite impressive. Here is how we summarized it in graph form in November:
As we discussed in November, Amazon is likely to roll out more services in the near future. Here are some further pointers that can be helpful if you are new to AWS:
Dr. Vogels made the case for why it makes sense for businesses, particularly startups, to use AWS. He started by pointing out that building Web-scale services is incredibly difficult. He showed examples of traffic graphs from major retailers like Target and Walmart that demonstrated that even these companies are not able to handle peak loads. He added that conventional wisdom is just wrong when it comes to understanding what it takes to build a scalable infrastructure.
For startups, Vogels advocated the 37Signals philosophy - build now, scale later. This is not because scaling isn't important, it is because scaling is just too hard. As a young company, focusing on infrastructure is very costly. His statistics indicated that up to 70% of resources can go into what he calls Undifferentiated heavy lifting - work that does not fit into your company's core competency. Instead, he suggests that businesses should rely on AWS to do all this work.
AWS is continuing to impress. Amazon is now focused on amplifying the customer success stories and turning that buzz into more customers. Given the pricing and simplicity of AWS, it appears that it is not going to be long before a large percentage of small and medium size companies will be using one or more Amazon Services. Larger companies are likely to lag behind, mostly for political and branding reasons, so it will be interesting to see if this inflexibility will hurt them in the long run.
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Definitely! AWS is as disruptive as Skype and YouTube. In the near future, we may not need anymore to buy hardware from Sun, or lease servers from GoDaddy.
Posted by: Emre Sokullu | March 27, 2007 3:27 PMI think that it could be disruptive and that it may have been disruptive and in the future it will be more disruptive. But I have been trying with no luck to get access to EC2 for some time. I love the idea of leased servers and infrastructure that is completely on demand. Now if only they would let me play.
Steve
Posted by: Steve Severance | March 27, 2007 6:47 PM
Posted by: Raj | March 31, 2007 2:51 AMThe bandwidth charges for EC2 are not competitive in my opinion. I can get 2TB of transfer with my current ISP AND compute power for half of the bandwidth alone with Amazon. Funny enough -- it just doesn't scale.
At the moment, S3Browse.com is yet another webfrontend to S3 but our next step is to get EC2 to work on more efficient and volumeous content processing functionality. Thanks to EC2 we can focus on our business and let Amazon take care of the infrastructure.
Posted by: Ernest | April 3, 2007 5:46 AM