Is Jeff Bezos a visionary genius?

[mshan]

"“I have 10 engineers, but without A.W.S. I guarantee I’d need 60,” said Daniel Gross, Cue’s 20-year-old co-founder. “It just gets cheaper, and cheaper, and cheaper.” He figures Cue spends something under $100,000 a month with Amazon but would spend “probably $2 million to do it ourselves, without the speed and flexibility.”

"The lower cost of computing, along with overnight deployment of machines, drives the business. Germany’s Spiegel TV paid A.W.S. to make digital copies of 20,000 programs. It cost less than Spiegel would have paid for the electricity powering its own servers."

"The efficiency of this hyper-aware environment is already remaking jobs for many and will most likely dislocate more. “You can now test a product against millions of users for just a few thousand dollars, or start a company with just one or two people,” said Graham Spencer, a partner at Google Ventures, which invests in data-heavy start-ups that rely on such cheap computing. “It’s a huge change for Silicon Valley.”

"That vision is in line with the way Mr. Bezos sees A.W.S., say executives who have worked with him. “Jeff thinks on a planetary level,” said David Risher, a former Amazon senior executive who now heads a charity called Worldreader, which uses A.W.S. to download books to thousands of computers in Africa. “A.W.S. is an opportunity, as a business. But it is also a philosophy of enabling other people to build big systems. That is how Amazon will make a dent in the universe.”

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/active-cloud-amazon-reshapes-computing-093507607.html

 

[Phokus]

As a reddit user, AWS has been kind of unstable (although recently better i guess).

 

[M0oG0oGaiPan]

They also have their Mechanical Turk thing

https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

 

[Exterous]

I see a 4 way fight for control over this country. Apple vs Amazon vs Google vs Walmart

GO!

 

[BrunoPuntzJones]

As a reddit user, AWS has been kind of unstable (although recently better i guess).

I'm not sure Reddit would be a good case for basing AWS services on.

NASA and the European Space Agency use it for data sharing. Lots of folks use it for login authentication, etc. Probably use it on a lot more sites than you realize.

 

[Phokus]

I'm not sure Reddit would be a good case for basing AWS services on.

NASA and the European Space Agency use it for data sharing. Lots of folks use it for login authentication, etc. Probably use it on a lot more sites than you realize.

When it went down for reddit, did it affect anyone else? I thought it did...

 

[Albatross]

You can`t become CEO these days without mentioning da cloud™ every 5 minutes or so.

 

[mshan]

Interesting commentary here about how Amazon's cloud capability evolved out of idle time from servers they originally built just to deal with orders in 4th quarter of each year: http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000112384&play=1

 

[Ns1]

related post:

https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesvaVX

 

[RedCOMET]

I see a 4 way fight for control over this country. Apple vs Amazon vs Google vs Walmart

GO!

Lol. Who ever wins that battle will then have to fight the league of shadows before sky net comes in to cleanup the mess.

 

[BrunoPuntzJones]

You can`t become CEO these days without mentioning da cloud™ every 5 minutes or so.

While I'm tired of hearing about it too, being the CEO of one of the companies that pioneered it, I'll let it slide

When it went down for reddit, did it affect anyone else? I thought it did...

My understanding Reddit was dissproportionately affected because of 1) The service they were using was on a single service center from way back when AWS was getting off the ground, and 2) The area affected by the outage happened to be where Reddit was hosted.

IIRC, they got a larger bite out of the shit sandwich for being an early adopter, and as time passed, their data hadn't been propogated to other data centers in the case of such an event happening. But others had issues as well.

So I'll retract a bit from saying not to rely on the Reddit thing, I remember the event a little better now. And goes to show you that you should always be running something local, never know what can happen.

 

[AreaCode707]

Amazon was the most interesting company I ever worked for. It's not run like a corporation, it's run like a series of startups that have a centralized administration center. They operate on a lot of tribal knowledge rather than documentation but somehow don't seem to suffer from it like a lot of large companies that ignore documentation and process.

 

[TechBoyJK]

As a developer, I really don't like the idea of developing on Amazon's cloud in anyway that marries me to the platform or the company.

This is why I prefer using a traditional virtualization stack, on a 'private cloud' which in my mind is an array of redundant hardware (servers, storage, network gear, etc) managed with an enterprise quality hypervisor (vmWare). I can pickup my virtual servers and move them to any other host that provides vmWare hosting (plenty of em), and since my actual servers are traditional OS based instances, there's always the ability to redeploy my servers on a completely different hypervisor (xen, kvm).

It's a little more complex, but not really if you just find a host providing the virtual servers on a private cloud they manage.

I use vmWare based virtual servers from www.vServerCenter.com

The prices are fair, the service is good, they are 24x7/365 with a highly certified top tier facility, and they have a pretty amazing vmWare cloud. It's not huge, but they are really trying to make a 100% uptime cloud and have probably spent $5M on it.