This month’s Tokyo2point0 event drew a huge crowd on Monday this week. Two main factors attracted over 100 people to come to the new venue in Azabu (an event space called SuperDeluxe): a very interesting speaker who came from the USA and the event’s 1st anniversary!
Cloud Computing the Amazon way
Jinesh Varia, evangelist for Amazon Web Services, delivered the presentation of the evening.
Jinesh, who is based out of Seattle, began by dubbing Amazon’s Web Services division (AWS) “the technology arm of Amazon”. He said Amazon began to understand the concept of scaling in 1999 and explained a single product page on amazon.com actually retrieves information from up to 300 different sources on the web.
AWS basically provides three different services:
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
- Amazon SimpleDB for data bases
The main point Jinesh made was that cloud computing enables operators of web sites to structure the development process more efficiently. He acknowledged SaaS shortened development time enormously but went on saying that it provides no differentiated value to businesses. According to Jinesh, SaaS solutions suck up 70% of energy, time and money in the scaling process and only 30% are left for developers to create differentiated value.
Supposedly, Amazon’s way of cloud computing is able to flip this ratio. With the Internet becoming more and more ubiquitous and bandwith constantly getting cheaper, Jinesh said the cloud computing concept will become easier to use, more personalized and cheaper in the future.
The main principles of cloud computing according to the speaker are:
- elastic, umlimited capacity
- pay when you grow
- simple, reliable, fast
Jinesh said cloud computing enables every individual with a laptop and Internet connection to challenge even the biggest web companies. He closed his presentation with a few case studies, demonstrating which web services used AWS (most remarkably www.animoto.com).
You can watch his presentation here (video courtesy of event organizer Andrew Shuttleworth):
See also:
Another report on the event by Fumi-san [JP]
Serkan Toto
AWS is really letting startups scale in ways that only big companies could in the past. We use AWS extensively at TuneCore. I’ll be talking more about how we use AWS at RubyKaigi next week, I can’t wait!