What the Hell Is Amazon Web Services?

With AWS CEO Andy Jassy's rise to the top spot at Amazon, we're suddenly inundated with articles about Amazon Web Services (aka "AWS"). These tend to explain what his AWS is, but none of them hit the mark in some way. 

Given that AWS has been largely relegated to the technical arena, AWS is slowly making its way into mainstream media. Whether it's the downfall of Parlor, a failed bid for the Department of Defense, or getting caught up in an open source licensing issue that no one understands, it's getting harder and harder to miss.

In this post, I'll do my best to explain his AWS to those lucky enough to have a job that doesn't require them to deal with arcane cloud computing concepts.  

The origin story

This is actually the same Amazon as Amazon.com. The company that started as We Are A Bookstore is now a Seattle-based company called We Are The Freaking Everything Store.

About 18 years ago (old history in computer terms), Amazon realized that if all product teams could speak to each other using computer protocols instead of English, they would have a huge competitive advantage. rice field. In 2006, the idea was introduced to customers in the first iteration of a series of "web services" that turned the whole game upside down. 

Before this existed, setting up a server (large computer) on the Internet to host a website required purchasing a physical computer from a company such as Dell or HP, or renting it on a monthly basis from another company. had. It took a while and building a website became a very expensive and labor intensive process. The servers cost thousands of dollars each, the racks holding them and the connection to the internet cost thousands of dollars a month, and the only other option proved to be of very questionable reliability. It was about renting these things from various vendors.Before AWS, anything that could handle a lot of traffic could cost millions of dollars to keep the infrastructure running. Yes (prepaid, cash). It might still be $1 million these days, but it's been spread over time as an operating expense, giving you more control over how much you spend.  

AWS' overall goal was to make services that were previously available only to the large companies that invested in them available to virtually anyone with a credit card. This started with basic services like "virtual machines", "storage services that store data and return it on demand", and a few other services not specifically relevant to this discussion.

These services have been transformative for AWS customers and, over time, have grown to nearly 200 currently available in 2021.

About five years after AWS came out, other companies realized what Amazon was doing and were desperate to do the same for themselves. But AWS had a big lead. 

The present day

AWS is huge today. Netflix works on it, as does Capital One, FINRA, DoorDash, and others. When Lyft went public, it said it was spending at least $100 million a year on AWS. All in all, AWS is currently generating over $51 billion in annual revenue (AWS is growing over 25% year-over-year!) and continues to grow.

Whoever you are, this is serious money. But the same services these companies use are available to anyone with a credit card.  

One of my trial accounts is free because it fits into the rather restrictive "free tier" offered by AWS. The cost of an account to run my e-mail newsletter is about $7 per month.

AWS basically succeeded. For anyone with a website or mobile app idea, there are multiple ways to power up his computing infrastructure with a relatively small amount of money. And this infrastructure has the potential to grow worldwide. 

The only effective limit is budget (there's a reason my consulting firm is only focused on fixing that awful AWS bill). Because AWS will definitely run out of money before running out of computers to boot. For all practical purposes, AWS scales infinitely.  

Amazon’s culture

The same culture that propelled Amazon from a garage start-up to the world's most valuable company doesn't make laptops with insultingly bad keyboards and is run by a boneheaded man as an upfront payment. When they claim to be “customer obsessed,” they mean business. This is reflected in the computer services they release.  

Unlike Google, which seems to joke about its services, AWS sees its services as a promise to its customers. They almost never deprecate existing services (their official blog has two entries for him in the obsolescence category, both pushed back so as not to disrupt the workloads of existing customers). , has been changed). If a customer builds something on her AWS, she doesn't have to worry about being forced away from the services she uses as long as she complies with the law and doesn't violate AWS's standard acceptable use policy. Of course, every story has two sides.

AWS will never be obsolete, so today his AWS is a multifaceted company that does all sorts of things, from communicating with satellites in orbit, to researching quantum computing, to selling machine learning-enabled race cars. A veritable sea of ​​diverse services. As a result, the list of services for those new to AWS's vast ecosystem can be completely overwhelming. This is clearly Amazon's responsibility. It's also a source of growing concern for virtually every company that manufactures software. Will AWS release a new service to eat lunch tomorrow? 

To be very clear: I'm not saying they're slowing down their pace of innovation. Customers with painful problems don't demand that vendors innovate more slowly. Instead, what needs to change is the messaging about these services and how they are tailored to be far more discoverable by the very people each service is designed for. 

How does AWS do this?

AWS is made possible by Amazon, which focuses on small service teams that function mostly autonomously. As a result, new services are introduced and updated more frequently over time to improve the functionality of existing services. My newsletter was an attempt to extract the signal from all the noise.

Looking at Amazon through the lens of corporate structure, one can also agree with the fact that Amazon may be an alien organism compared to just about every company on the planet. 

Product Owners are given an incredible amount of autonomy. They are also very strictly accountable for service outages, unmet customer needs, and business goals, but they are poorly managed.

This style of management is difficult to reproduce and may not be suitable for all employees. Reading this, wow, it sounds like a terrible place to work, but okay. In many ways, I think the same.

So you have it: Basics of AWS Stories. If you want to learn more about AWS and what's happening at the company, sign up for my newsletter and yell at me on Twitter.