Virtual Centralization Rockets with Amazon Web Services

The Amazon Web Services blog just published Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' graph showing when the  bandwidth consumption of AWS overpassed that of the whole Amazon.com infrastructure:

(I hope they don't mind me posting this here)

This is amazing: in something like 18 months, Amazon gave birth to a new Internet giant web-service.

As an intense AWS user (S3 in Pictogame, S3 & EC2 in Podmailing), I want to comment on what they did right:

• Pricing: marginal, no upfront, quite cheap from the start.
• API: simple yet powerful. Sometimes it's frustrating, but the learning curve is very steep and implementations in every language are there to kick-start.
• Support: in addition to solving its user's problems, the AWS team is clearly using the forums to get feedback on what to add and how people want to use it and they do listen.

I must stress that using AWS is not only about replacing your server hardware. I feel that even if you start small, AWS relieves you of hiring and managing a team of technicians to manage the hardware. It takes so many issues off the table!

And even before it helps you technically, it helps you to write your business plan. It's like the most solid line in your business model is the infrastructure cost line. And it drives design choices from the start:

For instance, in Podmailing we use EC2 servers in addition to S3. And our EC2 virtual servers push a lot of data between users (using BitTorrent) and towards S3. In just a few minutes on a spreadsheet, and by inputting AWS pricing data, we saw that for our application, EC2 computing cost is negligible compared to the bandwidth cost. It implies that we can feel free to add more instances at will, instead of investing too much in server CPU usage optimization.

One more word, about what they are doing wrong. AWS is too US-centric:

• billing is only available on amazon.com accounts, in USD
• the start-up competition for Amazon funding was restricted to US start-ups
• FPS and DevPay accounts require that you have a US bank account
• the Europe-based S3 buckets seemed like good news but:
  • when using from Europe (Paris at least), they are actually slower than US buckets!
  • they too can only be paid in USD
  • they don't support the BitTorrent seeding feature we have come to love from S3 in the US

Many of us Europeans have been complaining about it in the forum, it is quite painful. I hope they will fix it soon. In the meantime we just have to be happy that AWS is soooo much cheaper thanks to the € supremacy over the $...

Anyway, thanks a lot Amazon, I don't know how we could do without you!

Comments

[Lakshmi Mareddy]

Thanks for stopping by Louis Choquel :) What Amazon is doing wrong most of all is its UI. For a first time user, the registering/shopping loop is crazy..

And another thought is why dont they employ openID? Hmmm...