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Amazon CTO Vogels: “Amazon Only Moderate Customer of AWS”
This morning I attended Amazon’s Executive Cloud Computing Workshop. I was able to snap some photos and jot down some notes I’d like to share. The presenters included Werner Vogels – VP & CTO at Amazon.com and Marten Mickos – Sun SVP. I very much enjoyed Werner’s discussion – he basically took us on a tour of the history of AWS (ec2, s3, etc) and some examples of how customers are utilizing their cloud infrastructure services.
Werner explained that using Amazon web services (AWS) helps companies move from capital expenses to variable costs. The basic idea is that instead of buying enough hardware to make sure you can handle spikes, AWS can grow and shrink as needed.
Here you can see how fast AWS is growing and how in mid-2007, AWS bandwidth passed the bandwidth used by Amazon itself. Werner said if they showed 2008 on the chart, the Amazon line would be gone as the growth has been that big. In fact, he said that Amazon’s ecommerce sites combined is only a moderate customer of AWS.
On a typical product page on Amazon (say for a book), Amazon pulls 200-300 services to generate the page. Each service is managed by an Amazon employee and Amazon gives them the flexibility to build in the language and tools that best fit the needs of the service.
Here you can see the growth in registered developers for AWS. At least count it was 500,000 (I am one of the 500,000).
One of the interesting examples Werner provided came from the New York Times. They wanted to put all of their old editions online but didn’t want to utilize their current TIFF files as they were very large in size per page. They wanted to use PDF files instead. They had to convert 4TB of data and internally they looked at using 6 servers and a lot of hours of development. By using AWS, they got the project fully completed in a weekend and it cost $25 in EC2 processing and S3 storage.
Check out all of my event photos on Flickr.
What i learnt this morning was you cant be too stupid to still make a kazillion dollars on the Internet.
Marten Mickos – the ex ceo of MySql (now Sun employee) was an absolute disaster, he had little if no grasp on where the current state of cloud computing was.
I was out of the room when his topic started but after sitting through 15 minutes i had to google his photo on my cell to make sure that they didn’t sub in a last minute replacement or something like that.
He may be a wizz with database experience I have no idea and following Werner Vogels would be a tough task for anyone as his presentation was spectacular but seriously my dog could have done a better job.
On a positive note there was an official video recording of the session they are going to email us links to so hopefully Allen will upload it to Center networks once they finish editing it, if not i will defiantely be posting it to my site.
Cheers,
Dean Collins
http://www.collins.net.pr/blog
I think they sent the wrong person from Sun. He said that his group focuses on the mysql db side not the cloud side – it was a weird presentation – almost as if he was asking us to reassure him that he was right.
the announcer said they would post audio – had i known that i would have brought my tripod and did a video…
BTW you forgot to mention that AWS now has the ability to host your content on a geographical basis.
So web developers can now host their content in Europe and get around all those nasty USA based software patent laws.
Interesting to see how Amazon are handling takedown notices as well considering prepaid credit cards are a piece of cake to obtain.
Cheers,
Dean
Thanks for the comments on my presentation. I am sorry if it wasn’t useful to you. I had been asked to do a high-level presentation for business executives – not a technical one.
You are right that I represent only the MySQL part of Sun’s business. The thought was that MySQL is one of Sun’s most prolific products used in clouds (especially EC2). Sun has a separate group building a cloud offering under the Network.com name. I’d be happy to hook you up with that group if you are interested in an in-depth discussion with them.
And if you have concrete suggestions on what I should change in the presentation, I am all ears.
Marten Mickos
Marten – my suggestion would be to talk from strength. I think you had a few times where you said you didn’t know the answer. There’s no reason to say that – make slides that talk about the things you know (which clearly you have a lot) – and talk from strength. Remember that event as you noted was to pitch your services – and if you want those companies to invest in Sun/MySQL you have to make sure they know you can lead them.
Thanks for asking!
lol – now i feel bad, dont worry i’m sure you are worth more than me, so feel free to laugh all the way to the bank.
I guess I was confused why someone from Sun who was presenting at a cloud computing session was surprised there were more than 20 people in the room running production apps on AWS.
Maybe it’s a NY thing as well because every second startup i come across these days is building their platform using cloud based platforms.
Cheers,
Dean
BTW you cant be too bad a guy when you can take a comment about my dog on the chin and come back with a request for constructive feedback, kudos to you.