Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Werner Vogels, Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, Amazon.com

Mr. Vogels is the VP and CTO of Amazon.com. His talk focused on how Amazon has created an the backbone which can enable small start-ups to reach scale by using the Amazon's infrastructure. The talk centered around how to build a business around ideas verses resources. Amazon services is designed to help a launch new businesses. Building an architecture to deal with peaks 3-4X the average daily transactions is difficult. The 70/30 switch 70% on heavy lifting (infrastructure) and only 30% time investing in actual product development. Amazon chart - service oriented - 150 services together to create a single page. Three parts of infrastructure = EC2 - Compute, S2- Storage - SQS which does Messaging= Web scale computing. Web-scale computing turns huge fixed costs into a variable cost. scalable-increase or decrease capacity impacts cost Effective - low rate pay-as you-go, Reliable and Simple- SOAP and REST based computing. Simple storage service 15 cents per Gigabyte per month and 20cents a GB data transfer. Why can't the GDS follow this model. Rather than owning the transaction, how about owning the infrastructure?
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