On stage at AWS re:Invent last week, CTO Werner Vogels discussed Amazon Web Services’ cloud philosophy, increasingly driven by a belief in building architecture that is cost-aware and designed to optimize economies of scale so it can do volume transactions at thin margins. The talk, a first-day keynote with Senior Vice President Andy Jassy, predicated the group’s belief in a programmable infrastructure that has more instance types and object storage than any public cloud services provider. For example, Frederic Lardinois wrote about AWS introduction of a “Cluster High Memory” instance type that will offer a massive 240 GB of RAM and two 120 GB SSDs. Jassy also unveiled a “High Storage” instance focused on storage and will come with 117 GB of RAM and 24 hard drives for a total of 48 terabytes of HDD space. The two keynotes illustrated AWS’s view on cloud computing, which differs from enterprise vendors that have focused on selling hardware to customers for “private clouds.” It was the first time AWS has stated so clearly how it views cloud computing and its competitors, which they say have been “cloudwashing” customers into believing that their costly solutions are better than the rest. AWS, through its programmable architecture, has built a $ 1.5 billion business on volume and thin-as-possible margins. The group has dropped pricing 23 times since 2006, including an approximate 25 percent cut that Jassy announced during his keynote. He attributed the drop in price to what he called a virtuous lifecycle. On Thursday, Vogels showed how a business-driven infrastructure gives customers their own ability to develop businesses that are data driven and optimized to make their operations so tight that they can also operate on low margins. Vogels explained how an architecture can adapt to changing business needs based on automated practices that use data to analyze and then program instances that auto-scale with expected increases or decreases in demand. He described it as “cost aware architecture,” meaning that the infrastructure drives application development, as opposed to the other way around. Embodied in this is the increasing requirement for the applications to be controllable, resilient, adaptive and data driven. Amazon.com started AWS because they needed more infrastructure in order for the business to scale. They also needed a better way to handle the fluctuations that would come when they had ups and downs in web traffic. Customers will often have to estimate physical storage, for
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