This week in class we are watching this presentation by Dr. Werner Vogels, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Amazon.
The Amazon Cloud was initially developed for Amazon's engineers. Amazon's product teams work around the concept of "You Build It, You Run It." After a while Amazon noticed that the productivity of it's teams was going down. Amazon did a deep analysis of its product teams and found out that a lot of them were spending large amounts of time overseeing the management of their infrastructure, i.e. managing servers, data stores, etc. That is when the idea of a cloud service was ignited. Amazon needed to improve its IT infrastructure to better its business processes.
There were many considerations that Amazon reviewed when designing its cloud service. First and foremost, they wanted to design it for flexibility. They did not want to limit the innovation of their engineers so it needed to be extremely versatile. It also needed to be an on-demand service. Amazon had initially a few hours turn around time on provisioning new servers, but this was not going to be good enough so they developed a completely automated and scalable process for on-demand provisioning and de-provisioning.
Amazon foresaw this new service as becoming the next "utility" offering so they developed a utility-based pricing structure that's benefits them and their clients. They also needed to break down the transparency of cloud computing to allow for latency management and compliance with local regulations to grow their client base. Amazon knew from their retail business that they could not make this service a success alone. They solicited support from an "associates" model and built APIs for companies to utilize and mutually benefit from. These benefits and additional growth also helped Amazon create additional economies of scale allowing them to continually drive down pricing. They also needed to look at what services would be universal for all its clients including low pricing, reliability, guaranteed performance, and security. After all of these considerations were implemented, the Amazon Cloud Service was born.
To read more about the Amazon Cloud Service and its use in IT, check out these recent news articles:
Research and Markets: Cloud: Successful Strategies for Providing Services
Case study: Energy firm scales IT through Amazon Web Services cloud
Clouds vs Outsourcing
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