Werner Vogels is the highly visible and peripatetic CTO of Amazon, who has become the poster child of cloud computing, and has been acknowledged by IW as the CTO of the year.
Vogels writes on his blog — All Things Distributed — frequently, and recently summed up the value proposition for Amazon Web Services in our newly cost-conscious world pretty succinctly:
[from Using the Cloud to build highly-efficient systems]
In recent weeks in my discussions with many of our Amazon Web Services customers I have seen a heightened interest in moving functionality into the AWS cloud to get a better grasp on controlling cost. And this is across the board; from young businesses to Fortune 500 enterprises, from research labs to television networks, all are concerned about reducing upfront cost associated with the new ventures and reducing waste in existing operations. Most of them point to 3 properties of the Amazon Web Services model that helps them become more efficient:
- The pay-as-you-go model. There are significant advantages to this model for efficiency as one only pays for those resources one has actually consumed. If the application scales along the right revenue generating dimensions these costs will be in line with the revenue being generated.
- Managing peak capacity. Many IT organizations need to maintain extra capacity for anticipated peak loads, capacity that sits idle for most of the time. These peak loads can be driven by customer demand such as in the online world, but it can also be capacity required to execute essential IT tasks such as periodic document indexing or business tasks such as closing the books at the end of a quarter. This is often the first step that our enterprise customers take to become familiar with using infrastructure as a service. After successfully running some of their peaks jobs they will then starting moving more permanent processing into the cloud.
A great example in the online world is the Indy 500 organization that normally runs 50 servers to serve their customers, but during the races move all of their processing into Amazon EC2 to handle all traffic no matter how many hundreds of thousands of customers show up at the same time. The savings for the Indy IT budget during the races this spring was over 50%.
- Higher reliability at lower cost. Negotiating several contracts with different datacenter and network providers to make sure the IT tasks can survive complex failure scenarios is a difficult task and many organizations find it hard to achieve this in a cost efficient manner. Amazon EC2 with its Regions and Availability Zones gives its customers access to several high-end datacenters with highly redundant networking capabilities at a single pricing model, without any negotiations.
It is interesting that Vogels stated recently at LeWeb in Paris that security has been of less importance for clients in recent months. Here’s the video link, although he is mostly pushing EC2, the elastic computing release.
What is clear is that Vogels, and Amazon, have created a platform that best typifies the basic promise of Web 2.0: O’Reilly’s Web As A Platform.
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