Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, was first keynote speaker of the day at Activate09. My notes from his presentation suffer from my usual unintelligible handwriting issues (really wish I’d taken my MBP with me), but this is what I can glean (and recall).
Vogels focussed initially on the removal of resource constraints (in terms of the access to processing capability that Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers). He offered several examples of the application of AWS, including the Guardian’s own crowdsourcing of the interpretation of MPs’ expenses data, a social gaming developer – Playfish – who had 27 million users of their Facebook games, and the Indy500 (which offered seven live streams of the racing to 3-4million users, but for only three days a year).
He cited Hagel and Seely Brown’s 2005 article ‘From Push to Pull’ (which seems to have been in The McKinsey Quarterly) as emphasising the issue of mobilising resources (and by extension, not necessarily owning those resources). Faced with limited access to capital (especially given the current financial environment), not owning the resources reduces risk and makes the cost of IT a variable cost. He describes AWS as “infrastructure services”. It was evident that Vogels was taking the Nick Carr line on the commoditisation of IT, as he drew the same parallels to the supply of electricity as Carr does in The Big Switch and earlier.
Vogels then went on to run through quite a few more examples of firms employing AWS. Autodesk wants to do 3D CAD on the web and is using AWS to reduce the risk associated with buying their own infrastructure (at that scale) to support the service. Livestream – who do live video streams, as you might imagine – have no servers of their own, at all. Animoto, another Facebook app developer, had a huge demand spike for one of their apps (Vogels said 25,000 users per hour, though he had already said 25,000 something else just before this, so it might not be accurate). Their use of Amazon ‘instances’ (= virtual servers) scaled from 50 to 5000 over a few days. Bild.de (German newspaper) wanted to start a citizen video journalist project. Their internal IT team said it would take 9-12 months to get it up and running. They launched in 4 weeks on AWS. He went on to mention, but not elaborate on, Pfizer and Eli Lilley in pharmacuticals, the Washington Post and New York Times, eHarmony (dating) and Smugmug (who have 1 petabyte of image data on Amazon’s S3 storage service and eBayed their hardware).
He ended up with some points on a cloud ecosystem and marketplace, though I didn’t actually note the detail (doh!).
Apart from the examples, I didn’t get anything I didn’t already know about the cloud and of course Werner didn’t mention the outages (though Ted Dziuba in The Register today suggests that Amazon’s response to technical fails was substantially better than Google’s). Nonetheless, I was wishing I’d been able to write my cloud and HE blog post for JISC after this, rather than before.
