A Head in the Clouds
September 23, 2008
Disclaimer: this is a live on the fly post during a talk. I may edit it later.
I wormed my way into Werner Vogels’ keynote at the Streaming Media conference in San Jose, California. The title of this Web log post is not precisely what Dr. Vogels’ typed on his title slide. He offered “Ahead in the Clouds”, and the idea is that Amazon is leaving Google, Salesforce.com, and others like Apple behind. My version of the title makes clear my skepticism about some of the cloud initiatives for people my age. I know that those under 20 in body and mind see the era of clunky PCs, weird laptops, and other assorted access devices that promise unparalleled freedom. I don’t want to be free of my computing infrastructure but I want to learn. I’m perched on a metal chair with an open mind. I want to capture two or three ideas from Dr. Vogels and then offer my own comments. If you want a complete summary of his remarks, look for Web log postings from “real” journalists; I’m the addled goose, not a human tape recorder.
First, the subtitle of the talk is “The Power of Infrastructure as a Service”. I think I understand, but I wonder what happens if I have lousy bandwidth and the service crashes. Uptime and stability are often a work in progress even at Amazon as I await the lecture. In the back of my mind is the hunch that getting customers to rent infrastructure needed to deliver Amazon’s ecommerce services is a financial angle first and a substantive revenue generator second. I wonder how distant the Amazon Web services’ revenue is from Amazon’s retail revenue? If I remember I will try to find this number.
Second, looks to me as if this keynote is outpulling the other two going on at the same time. Amazon is a much bigger “name brand” than the consultants and software vendors competing for an audience. I estimate the crowd at about 150. You can buy an audio version of Dr. Vogels’ talk at www.streamingmedia.com. No information about the cost or who can buy the talks.
Third, a video is running with quite a few Microsoft centric folks in the images. Site referenced is Animoto. It is not clear if this is an Amazon-allied enterprise. Animoto is a music matching type site. Animoto is running on Amazon Web services. I wonder if Amazon is defraying some of the fees for a share in the company. Animoto is using all of Amazon’s Web services, so it’s a smart start up. Note: sound system is making it tough for me to parse Dr. Vogels’ speech. Animoto, if I heard correctly, delivers its users instant audio gratification.
Fourth, a slide of instance usage shows steady rise over time. I can’t make out the y axis or the x axis. The slide shows Animoto’s usage over time. The company can handle 35,000 customers per hour. Amazon made additoinal resources available. At start up 50 servers and now work is spread over 5,000 servers. The scaling is automatic and Animoto is happy. The pay off is that Animoto’s capital expense is minimized.
Fifth, most of the people in the room are Amazon customers. Now the meat of the talk–the technology side of Amazon. Amazon is a technology company. Technology is at the heart of Amazon. “We just happen to do retail,” says Dr. Vogels. Another graph showing the bandwidth demand over time. This is a hockey stick graph. Amazon Web services is sucking more bandwidth that “regular retail” Amazon. I wonder how the telecommunjications costs work out. The current slide shows the growth in Amazon developers. Now the company has 400,000 developers. The next graph shows a diagram that looks like a picture of an atom exploding. I am not sure what the graph depicts. There are no data and no labels on the chart. “It took us 10 to 12 years to get this Amazon architecture right.” My recollection is that Dr. Vogels joined the company more recently. I will have to look up his date of joining.
Sixth, Dr. Vogels is showing a list of the cost “heavy lifting” that Amazon has done. The idea is that AWS is a “shared services platform”. The infrastructure services scale up and down and are “highly reliable.” I wonder if uptime data will be available in this talk or on the Amazon Web site. The last time I looked, I could not find hard data to support these assertions about uptime as I recall.
Seventh, the services are now available as a content delivery network. This will be a “pay as you go” service. One benefit is scaling up and scaling down. The down scaling takes place in a matter of minutes. Amazon has “spent billions of dollars over ten years to create the infrastructure.” No data provided on total investment.
Eighth, the AWS story is the core of this presentation because it holds down production costs and it is a distribution medium. Companies in the media business want to hold down costs and get distribution. New services can be enabled. The idea is that it is easier and cheaper to build a successful business using AWS.
Ninth, the four stages — produce, encode, distribute, and archive — of a business and AWS can play a role in each stage. Dr. Vogels is going through companies using AWS to deliver their media services. The Web site names are unfamiliar to me and there is no labeling of the sites on the PowerPoint slides. These AWS customers get “extremely high reliability services”. One site is RenderRocket.com. AWS provides capacity to this company. Vimeo.com uses AWS; the site is a social video site. The Indy Racing League uses AWS. IRL shows videos, delivers commentary, and community services. IRL reported a 50 percent savings using AWS. No figures provided. Another video example. This site allows the user to view the scene by selecting different camera’s. Panda Video is an open source community video service. The video sites are hard for me to differentiate. The message is clear: lots of buyers, reliable service, and more economical than using other options. No data on the specific charges for services and bandwidth.
Tenth, the “billions of objects in Amazon S3”. This slide shows growth but there is not definition of an object, so the slide is floating without concrete back up. I now want more substance, not just a run through of small sites using the AWS. I guess I am showing my age.
Stephen Arnold, September 23, 2008
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