Q&A: Getting a read on Amazon's Web-Scale Computing initiative

In his “All Things Distributed” blog entry posted July 21, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels makes note that on that day the 2.2 million Harry Potter book seven pre-orders on its sites worldwide (1.4 million on Amazon.com alone) turned into real orders, charged and delivered. Needless to say, Vogels knows a thing or two about how to adapt an IT infrastructure to meet wildly swinging demands on availability and capacity. Vogels will share his experiences overseeing Amazon’s Web infrastructure as one of the opening keynoters at IDG World Expo’s new Next Generation Data Center Conference & Expo running Aug. 6-9, in conjunction with LinuxWorld, in San Francisco. Here he gives a special pre-show overview of one piece of the big Amazon Web puzzle, its Amazon Web Services.

Click to see: Catch Werner Vogels’ keynote address at the Next Generation Data Center Conference coming Aug. 6-9 to San Francisco.

Between the Amazon platform, the Web-Scale Computing model and Amazon Web Services, I’m guessing some of our readers might be a little confused about ways in which they can work with Amazon to their companies’ benefit. Can you give us a quick rundown?

Web-Scale Computing characterizes the services offered by Amazon Web Services. Amazon Web Services gives software developers access to Amazon's Web-Scale infrastructure for storage (Amazon S3), compute (Amazon EC2), human intelligence (Amazon Mechanical Turk), product data (Amazon E-commerce Service), etc. Then we have Amazon Enterprise Solutions, which gives retailers access to Amazon's e-commerce technology and expertise. Amazon runs the e-commerce solutions for these companies. Examples include Target, bebe and Marks & Spencer (U.K.). Amazon also gives retailers of virtually any size access to our order-fulfillment infrastructure through the Fulfillment by Amazon service and to our back-end Web site functionality through the WebStore by Amazon service.

Tell us more about the types of services that fall under the AWS umbrella. Where do S3 and EC2 fit in? Can we expect to see more infrastructure-related services in the future?

There is a clear distinction between the Amazon E-commerce Service, which targets e-commerce developers who want to build applications and Web sites that drive traffic back to Amazon.com, and the Web-Scale Computing services such as EC2, S3 and SQS, which target general developers (very, very, very few of these developers are in e-commerce) who need to build highly reliable and scalable Internet applications. What they all have in common is that they use Web services as the mechanism for access to the services. S3/EC2/SQS are part of opening up those technologies that have made Amazon.com development highly successful. They abstract from the developer many of the menial tasks of managing a large server infrastructure, and they are a highly cost-effective by only charging for what the customer actually uses. We do not disclose our future plans but we are continuously evaluating whether more services that make Amazon.com developers successful also are meaningful for a wider audience.

How many developers are using AWS today, and how many — or what percentage — of those are using S3 and EC2?

Amazon Web Services has more than 240,000 registered developers across all of our services. We do not break out developers for each service, however.

Is this in line with where you wanted AWS to be at this juncture?

We’re pleasantly surprised by the reaction of the developer community to the services we’ve launched. We’re seeing even more innovation and breadth of use than we anticipated. That said, our developer business is very small today as compared with our retail and even our third-party seller business today, but down the road we expect our developer business to also be a meaningful part of Amazon.com’s business.

What infrastructure- and/or network-related lessons have you learned since moving Amazon to a services orientation?

For some time the Amazon Web-Scale Computing services already supported the services on which the Amazon.com and enterprise partner Web sites are built. As such we didn’t have that many new major learnings. But we are still learning from the way in which our customers are using our services innovatively. This sometimes triggers new usage patterns for our services. For example, some use S3 for large-scale software distribution while others will use it to service millions of small thumbnail images, yet others will use it for large file backups.

Since joining Amazon (not to mention over the years), you’ve undoubtedly worked with many innovative technologies. If you have to rate them in terms of impact for the business world at large, which would be highest on the list?

I believe there are a few different categories: 1) Amazon Web Services was unique when launched, as hardly any other company had opened up their internal data for reuse. 2) Amazon Enterprise Solutions is unique as it allows large enterprises to pick and choose the Amazon Service they need to build a solid multichannel operation based on e-commerce techniques. This was never done before. 3) Fulfillment by Amazon allows merchants, small and large, to exploit the highly efficient Amazon fulfillment network for the delivery of their goods. This is fully self-service and has never been done before in such a simple and effective manner. In each of these areas Amazon offers services that trigger widespread innovation.

And down the road, what emerging technology do you expect to have the most impact in next-generation infrastructures?

This is still day-one for each of the categories I mentioned above. Companies already are changing the way they do business based on Amazon's services. I expect this will further revolutionize the service integration in the enterprise world. We already see that the Web-Scale Computing services are triggering tremendous innovations in terms of new services and businesses, but also in the way that enterprises are thinking about resource management for their business. One such area is the software-as-a-service field that many traditional software companies are now entering. As these companies have very limited online operation and data center expertise, using Amazon's Web-Scale Computing services is an obvious choice for them.