Amazon Web Services: A Quick Reference Guide
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a collection of managed web services (infrastructure building blocks) that together make up a cloud computing platform. The most well known are Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Services (S3).
Amazon has been steadily improving and innovating on multiple fronts – storage, compute, databases, management and orchestration. The innovation is outpacing the market ability to absorb in many cases. Corporate IT is way behind the startup world in its ability to comprehend, let alone leverage these Web Services.
The next decade is going to be the transformation of enterprise architecture to take advantage of these innovations. Just like e-commerce took almost 10+ years to become mainstream, i anticipate the same trajectory is going to happen with the adoption of cloud web services.
How can these web services help your business? Read more 
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS pioneered the introduction of IaaS clouds in 2006. AWS mission “Enable businesses and developers to use web services (what people now call “the Cloud”) to build capable, sophisticated applications.”
AWS is essentially is a self-service infrastructure outsourcing business. It’s the third segment of Amazon.com’s business – consumer business, marketplace and IT infrastructure.
AWS business model is utility computing. Simply put this is a business model for on-demand delivery of computing power; consumers pay providers based on usage (“pay-as-you-go”), similar to the way in which we currently obtain services from traditional public utility services such as water, electricity, gas, and telephony.
Rapid Business Model Shift. In the IT infrastructure industry we are seeing the value migration to cloud (or utility computing) models. The concept is that computing is always there like electricity. When plugging an electric appliance into an outlet, we care neither how electric power is generated nor how it gets to that outlet. This is possible because electricity is virtualized; that is, it is readily available from a wall socket that hides power generation stations and a huge distribution grid. When extended to IT, this concept means delivering useful functions while hiding how their internals work. Read more
Pinterest: Leveraging the Amazon Cloud
Heard an interesting case study at the Amazon Web Services Summit, in New York. Pinterest is an online pinboard where users can organize, share and explore things they love. Pinterest was named 2012′s Breakout Digital Trend at South by Southwest in March.
Pinterest is completely running in the cloud. Pinterest has made heavy use of Amazon Web Services, in particular relying on Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 for critical infrastructure. What makes the case study interesting is the rapid growth, almost 18+M visitors, that Pinterest is able to support with a small infrastructure team.
According to Ryan Park, operations engineer for Pinterest, “The cloud has enabled us to be more efficient, to try out new experiments at a very low cost, and enabled us to grow the site very dramatically while maintaining a very small team of 2 people.” The advantages Pinterest is leveraging: (1) elastic capacity; (2) quick and global deployment; (3) No CapEx, no initial spend; (4) Pay as you go, for what you use; and (5) Automation and Reuse. Read more
Zynga’s Z-Cloud Infrastructure
Cloud Computing when done right can be a source of significant competitive advantage.
Case in point Zynga, the social gaming company.
Zynga, founded in 2007, is the world’s largest social game developer with more than 250 million monthly active users playing their games, which include CityVille, FarmVille, FrontierVille, Words With Friends, Mafia Wars, Zynga Poker, Café World and Treasure Isle.
Zynga games are available on a number of global platforms including Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, the iPad and iPhone, and Android devices.
Zynga makes most of its revenue by serving the 800m audience on Facebook.
Social games powered by Facebook represent a new form of entertainment that will capture an increasing proportion of consumer leisure time. The potential is huge. One data point… my 72 year old mother-in law spends hours playing games on her iPad.
Social games are the most popular applications on Facebook and will be, a key driver of engagement on social networks, and increasingly on mobile platforms.
Games have become the second most popular internet activity based on time spent, and have even surpassed email.
To support this growth, Zynga created a scalable hybrid cloud-based server and network infrastructure that enables it to deliver games to millions of players simultaneously with high levels of performance and reliability.
Private Cloud vs.Public Cloud Adoption Curves
Value Migration from old to new models is happening….Tech research firms (Gartner, IDC, Forrester etc.) are forecasting that the market for cloud services will expand at a dizzying pace over the next several years.
The driver is the need for responsiveness and innovation. Corporations struggle with the fact that it takes months to deploy applications and infrastructure, and too long for IT to respond to change requests. At the same time the rapid consumerization of IT trend is put even more pressure on IT groups.
So, whether you believe in the cloud trend or not, it’s penetrating faster than you think. Many lines of business are procuring cloud services on their own. The issue for companies and IT leadership: do you want to fight the trend or embrace the trend.
Right now most CIOs are not treating the cloud as a priority. Given the backlog of upgrades, Cloud is not a primary focus of IT departments, but another nice-to-have tool in IT’s bag of tricks. I anticipate that over the next 2-3 years, cloud computing will increasingly become a greater part of the portfolio of compute models that IT departments manage, sitting alongside traditional stand-alone computing and virtualization.
