Entrepreneurs and Cloud enthusiasts at Cloud Conclave 2011
had every reason to be at Cloud Nine. The Lord of all things distributed had arrived to address them. Dr.Werner Vogels, CTO of
Amazon.com, began his key note address amidst an excited audience who
gave him a welcome worthy of a rockstar. “We are still trying to behave
like a startup”, Dr. Werner quipped, as he reflected on the iconic
journey of Amazon Web Services ever since he joined in 2005.
He
narrated Animoto’s Cloud journey, the super-awesome video production
website which makes creating and editing videos a breeze and shared
insights from its stupendous success. He vividly recollected its peak
EC2 instance usage after the Facebook App was launched, letting the
customers post their videos in their profiles. In no time, the website
began serving 50,000 customers in an hour, with the help of 5000
servers. This wouldn’t have been possible without the Cloud. He also
attributed Zynga’s success story to the incredible infrastructure
provided by the Cloud.
He illustrated the
principles of a lean startup, drawing from the eponymous work by Eric
Ries, which embodies its principles from Japanese lean manufacturing.
With the Cloud removing the undifferentiated heavy lifting of
infrastructure, thus eliminating the waste that doesn’t lead to direct
value for customer, it is possible for startups to have relentless
customer focus and stay nimble to lead where the customer wants to take
it forward. “The lone guy sitting in his dorm room in IIT Bombay,
working towards creating the next Google/Amazon wouldn’t have to worry
anymore about infrastructure”, he struck an intimate chord with the
enchanted audience as he underlined the egalitarian nature of Cloud.
“Scalability
isn’t always about growing, but also about releasing space”, he pointed
out the oft-neglected perspective on scalability. Seamlessly shifting
his purview from the technical trenches of the Cloud to a holistic
picture of the disruptive changes happening at the enterprise, he threw
spotlight on the factors causing the end of business as usual.
With
increasing certainty, marked by abundance of applications and
availability of resources on demand, the App-empowered customer, takes
in only what he wants. He averred that the true power of Agility lies in
its ability to bring the cost of mistake to zero. With the Cloud
enabling the switching of software from one platform to the other a
child’s play, it minimizes the cost of mistakes and also obviates
concerns around optimization, having built efficiency into its
architecture.
“Each day AWS adds the equivalent server
capacity to power Amazon when it was a global $2.76 Billion Enterprise
circa 2000”, he gave a glimpse of the humongous volume of server
capacity that manages peak requests of 370,000+ per second. He also gave
a sneak peek into the complexity of the system with a new piece of
software being deployed every 11 seconds.
He
corroborated the growing importance of Analytics with every possible
data being informationalized and stored in the Cloud. With social
streams mining out wealth of information about the customers, Analytics
helps in deriving secondary revenue streams from Big Data. He shared
live-case examples on how Sound Cloud, which enables musicians to share
their sounds, collects rigorous data about its customer preferences to
discover new trends in music genres. He also plugged Amazon’s Elastic
Map Reduce which helps in removing the muck from big data processing.
“Amazon
Cloud is important than Web services”, he shared his philosophy of
Cloud in which any form of content would be delivered through a
platform. With the growing focus around Mobility of services, he listed
the sine-qua-non for Mobility. Rich Media Experience, Location Context
Aware, Real-time presence driven, Social Graph based, User generated
Content are among the few absolute requirements entailing the cost of
doing business in mobile development.
He concluded his
address inviting the students/entrepreneurs to take part in the Annual
AWS-Start- Up Challenge and grab prizes worth $100,000.
PS: Wrote this post for Yourstory.in on the occasion of Cloud Conclave 2011