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.