Amazon wants to be your data center provider

I’m at the combo LinuxWorld/Next Generation Data Center conference today. Werner Vogels, vice president and CTO for Amazon.com was one of the keynote speakers. In a fairly entertaining presentation, he made the point that data centers are hard to provision, expensive and messy to run. So, he concludes, why bother? Let Amazon be your data center provider. I’ve never bought data center services from the place where I buy my Harry Potter books. But hey, its a service-oriented world out there. In all fairness, Amazon has moved itself from a retailer into a Web platform provider and Vogels presents the age-old arguement. By selling data centers as a service, Vogels says that users pull their engineers from focusing on the impossible task of ensuring scaleability in an uncertain world. Those engineers can forget about worrying about failed disk drives and the like and instead concentrate on creating services that differentiate the business. By hiring out for a data center, Vogels says that such customers gain the ultimate in flexibility. They get unlimited bandwidth, total reliability and, at the same time, pay for only what they use, not for lots of hardware sitting around waiting for a spike in traffic. By sharing your outsourced data center with other users and balancing workloads between different types of customers, Amazon can charge only for what you use, Vogels promised. That is, a retailer who sees traffic spike 1000 percent in December doesn’t have to build out its capacity to handle that one month. It will share with, say, a company that needs to do a lot of late night processing (converting MP3 file formats, for instance). Both will be happy.