2016-03-10



March 14, 2006 was the beginning of a new era in computing. That was the day that Amazon Web Services released the Simple Storage Service (S3). Technically, Simple Queuing Services was released earlier but it was the release of S3 that really lit the fire under cloud computing. I remember that day well. At the time I was General Manager of Frontbridge Technologies, a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft that provided cloud hosted email antispam, antimalware, and archiving services. From this experience, I felt like I understood the customer value of cloud hosted services. I knew customers loved the speed of provisioning and low cost so, in many ways, I was already a convert. I already felt pretty sure that cloud hosting was the future.

But still the Amazon Simple Storage Service announcement was an eye opener for me. The technology industry has 100s of announcements each day and I don’t look at many. For the most part, they are uninteresting. But the S3 announcement was game changing. Most startling was the cost of the service. It was nearly 2 orders of magnitude less expensive than we were currently paying for multi-data center redundant storage. But what was even more disruptive was a credit card was all that was needed to provision storage. There was no required proposal for financial approval, there was no RFP, no vendor selection process, no vendor negotiation, and no data center space need be found. I could just sign up and start working.

What was at least as notable as the low cost and ease of provisioning was that the announcement came from Amazon rather than a traditional enterprise IT player. Rather than a company that is dedicated to high margins, difficult negotiations, and sometimes even license usage audits, this service came from Amazon. What looks to be “large” margins at Amazon would have shareholders at most enterprise IT companies calling for immediate management change. This really was different. A different supplier, a different model, a low friction provisioning path, and a fundamentally different price that starts low and falls rather than escalates over time.

The S3 announcement generated industry-wide interest and wonderment on how it would be possible, for even a very high volume supplier, to not lose money on every single byte sold. I was completely captivated by the offering and ended up writing several thousand lines of code using S3 as the underlying storage system. At times it was a bit clunky, there was the odd sharp edge, but writing the app really established in my mind that this was the beginning of something big.

From deciding to write the app to it being up and running was measured in days and, after debugging and testing extensively, the end of the month rolled around and I got my Visa bill. Of course, I knew abstractly that S3 was disruptively priced but when I saw that my bill for the entire development and test of this application was $3.08, it just seemed wrong. Once development was complete I was still storing all the test data in S3 so the following month I got a bill for $0.07.

This was so game changing that wrote it up, blogged it internally where I worked, and demoed it to company leadership including the CTO and CEO. My presentation included a picture of Al Vermeulen, one of the early developers on S3, showed some of how S3 worked and, to underline my point that this really was different, I included my two AWS bills. My key point was this wasn’t just a stunt or a fun little experiment by Amazon but was really a fundamental new way of delivering infrastructure services. Storage was first but compute was to follow shortly.

I got increasingly interested in AWS and by 2007 was attending user group meetings, doing presentations at Amazon, and eventually I just gave up and joined the team in late 2008.

As a member of the AWS engineering team, my first impressions are probably best summarized as fast. Decisions are made quickly. New ideas end up in code and available to customers at a speed that just makes the pace of enterprise IT look like continental drift. In a previous role, I remember (half) jokingly saying “we ship twice a decade whether customers need it or not.” Now new features are going out so frequently they are often hard to track.

Another interesting aspect of AWS is how product or engineering debates are handled. These arguments come up frequently and are as actively debated at AWS as at any company. These decisions might even be argued with more fervor and conviction at AWS but its data that closes the debates and decisions are made remarkably quickly. At AWS instead of having a “strategy” and convincing customers that is what they really need, we deliver features we find useful ourselves and we invest quickly in services that customers adopt broadly. Good services become great services fast.

In some of my past roles, I’ve seen these healthy debates become bigger than life and end up dragging on unproductively for years. At AWS they are resolved in days with customer usage data and the focus swings quickly to execution. It’s really refreshing to have the normal debate to delivery equation turned upside down. Most of the effort at AWS ends up in customer hands whereas, at many jobs I’ve held, much of the effort is in bringing these competing internal efforts to resolution. The AWS speed of delivery is great for customers and I find it an exciting environment for engineers.

The best proof of innovation is customer commitment and, without a doubt, the highest form of customer commitment is to decide to run the entire company on cloud infrastructure. Netflix was the first to publically make the decision to go 100% cloud. Some of my favorite examples of cloud “all in” corporate commitments:

2010 Netflix

2013 Kempinski Hotels

2013 Suncorp Group

2014 Infor

2014 Nippon Express

2014 Notre Dame University

2014 National Democratic Institute

2015 The Guardian Media Group

From my perspective, the companies that have decided to go with cloud only infrastructure are the most interesting and the most compelling examples of the massive change sweeping the industry. But, as an example of the AWS speed of innovation, check out some of the highlights over the last decade:

2006

2006 Amazon S3

2006 Amazon SQS

2006 Amazon EC2

2007

2007 AWS introduces commerce platform for AWS, rapidly accelerating adoption, Amazon FPS

2007 Amazon S3 in EMEA

2007 Amazon Simple DB

2008

2008 pricing plan for Amazon SQS and new WSDL (1st price drop)

2008 Elastic IP Addresses

2008 Availability Zones for EC2

2008 AWS adds Premium (enterprise) support

2008 AWS Lowers Data Transfer Costs

2008 Amazon Elastic Block Storage

2008 EC2 SLA and GA, EC2 for Windows, EC2 for SQL Server

2008 New Tiered Pricing for Amazon S3

2008 Amazon CloudFront

2008 EC2 in Europe (Ireland)

2009

2009 AWS Management Console

2009 New lower pricing tiers for Amazon CloudFront

2009 Amazon FPS

2009 Elastic MapReduce

May 2009 Elastic Load Balancing,

May 2009 Amazon Autoscaling

May 2009 Amazon CloudWatch

2009 AWS Virtual Private Clou

2009 New lower prices for Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances

2009 New lower prices for Windows instances with authentication services

2009 AWS enters the database market with Amazon Relational Database Service

2009 Lower Amazon EC2 on demand pricing

2009 EC2 Spot Instances

Dec 2009 AWS S3 Pricing reductions, Free Inbound Data Transfer until 6/30/2010

2009 Amazon CloudFront Streaming

2009 AWS US West Region

2010

2010 Lower Pricing for Outbound Data Transfer

2010 AWS launches first region in Asia Pacific (Singapore)

2010 Amazon SNS

May 2010 Multi Availability Zones for RDS

May 2010 Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage

2010 AWS Import/Export

2010 Amazon CloudFront adds HTTPS Support, lowers prices, Opens NYC edge location

2010 Cluster Compute Instances for EC2

2010 AWS Identity and Access Management

2010 Oracle certifies enterprise software on AWS

2010 New lower prices for High Memory Double and Quadruple XL instances\

2010 Read Replicas, Lower High Memory DB Memory Instance Prices for Amazon RDS

2010 Amazon S3 lowers storage prices

2010 Amazon Route 53

2010 Mobile SDKs for AWS

2011

2011 Amazon SES

2011 AWS New Premium Support Plans, Lowers usage prices by 50% on existing plans

2011 AWS Elastic Beanstalk

2011 AWS CloudFormation

2011 AWS Tokyo Region

May 2011 SAP certifies enterprise software on AWS

May 2011 Amazon CloudWatch custom metrics, lower prices for Amazon EC2 monitoring

2011 AWS new Data Transfer Pricing

Aug 2011 Amazon ElastiCache

Aug 2011 AWS enables enterprises to connect their data centers directly to AWS via AWS Direct Connect

Aug 2011 AWS launches Region dedicated to US Government Agencies and Contractors (AWS GovCloud)

2011 AWS Route53 lowers pricing for hosted zones

2011 AWS US West Region (Oregon) 100% Carbon Free Power

2011AWS enters South America with region in Sao Paulo, Brazil

2011 Amazon Elastic MapReduce support for cc2.8xlarge and reduced pricing for cc1.4xlarge

2012

2012 AWS Storage Gateway

2012 Dynamo DB

2012 Amazon SWF

2012 Amazon S3 lowers prices for standard storage

March 2012 New lower pricing for Amazon EC2, RDS and ElastiCache

April 2012 Amazon CloudSearch

2012AWS Marketplace for third-party selling of applications to businesses

2012 AWS Support Expands Free Tier, Adds Features, Lowers Prices

2012 AWS Sydney Region

July 2012 EC2 High I/O Instances

2012 Amazon Glacier

2012 EBS Provisioned IOPs Announced

2012 Second Gen Standard Instances for Amazon EC2 and a price reduction for M1 Instances

2012 More than 6K attend first AWS user conference, re:Invent

2012 AWS announces Amazon RedShift

2012 Amazon CloudSearch free trial program and price reduction

2012 Amazon RDS and Amazon ElastiCache Lower Prices

2012 Amazon S3 Lower prices for Standard Storage and RRS

2012 AWS Data Pipeline

2013

2013 Amazon Elastic Transcoder

2013 High Memory Cluster Instances

2013 EC2 Price Reduction, global expansion of M3 Standard Instances, reduced data transfer pricing

2013 AWS OpsWorks

2013 IBM protest reveals that AWS won $600M cloud contract with CIA

2013 Amazon RDS reduces price of Multi-AZ Deployments

2013 Amazon SQS and SNS lower prices and expand free tiers – 50% price drop for SQS

2013 AWS CloudHSM

2013 AWS introduces global developer training and certification program

2013 Lower prices on Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances, Amazon DB

2013 AWS lowers prices for Amazon S3 request pricing, Windows on-demand EC2 instances by up to 26%

May 2013 AWS first major cloud provider to gain FedRAMP certification

2013 AWS lowers prices of on-demand and reserved RDS instances by up to 28%

July 2013 AWS price reductions on EC2 dedicated instances

2013 AWS Gartner estimates that AWS customers are deploying 5x more infrastructure on AWS than the combined adoption of the next 14 providers

2013 Amazon AppStream launched

2013 Amazon WorkSpaces launched

2013 EC2 GPU Instances

2013 price reduction for M3 Instances

2013 – Amazon introduces Amazon Kinesis

2013 Amazon EC2 HI1 Instance price reduction and Spot availability

2013 Amazon China Region

2014

2014 New Amazon EC2 M3 Instance Sizes and Lower Prices for Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS

2014 AWS Storage Gateway price reduction

2014 Amazon Redshift new SSD-based node type

2014 General availability for Amazon AppStream and Amazon WorkSpaces

2014 AWS price reduction EC2, RDS, S3, ElastiCache, and Elastic MapReduce (price reduction #42)

2014 AWS receives Department of Defense-Wide provisional authorization for all U.S. Regions

2014 Availability of R3 instances

May 2014 Launch of AWS Management Portal for vCenter

May 2014 Introducing Amazon EBS encryption

2014 AWS availability of a new SSD-backed volume type for Amazon EBS (price drop #43)

2014 AWS Opened Pop-up Loft in San Francisco on temporary basis

2014 Amazon Redshift free trial and price reductions in Asia Pacific (price drop #44)

2014 new low-cost general purpose instance type for Amazon EC2

2014 Introduction of Amazon Zocalo (now known as Amazon WorkDocs)

2014 Route 53 price reduction (price drop #45)

2014 Introduction of services for mobile developers: Amazon Cognito, Amazon Mobile Analytics, AWS Mobile SDK, and Amazon SNS Mobile Push

2014 Launched Amazon CloudWatch logs

2014 AWS GovCloud achieves Department of Defense CSM Level 3-5 Provisional Authorization

2014 General availability of Zocalo (now known as Amazon WorkDocs)

2014 AWS EU (Frankfurt) region

2014 AWS Reopened Pop-up Loft in San Francisco on permanent basis

2014 Introduction of native support for document models like JSON into DynamoDB

2014 Introduction of AWS Directory Service

2014 AWS achieves ISO- 9001 certification

2014 Expansion of APN Partner benefits, introduction of new Managed Service and SaaS Partner Programs, and expansion of APN Partner training

2014 CloudSearch price drop (price drop #46)

2014 Introduction of Amazon Aurora, a MySQL-compatible database

2014 Enterprise security & governance services: Key Management, AWS Config, & AWS Service Catalog

2014 New application lifecycle management services introduced: AWS CodeDeploy & AWS CodePipeline

2014 Amazon EC2 Container Service introduced

2014 AWS Lambda announced

2014 Amazon EC2 C4 and EBS pre-announced

2014 AWS pledges long-term commitment to achieve 100 percent renewable-energy usage

2014 Data transfer and CloudFront price drop (price drop #47)

2015

2015 Amazon Wind Farm Fowler Ridge Announced

2015 Amazon WorkMail launches in preview

2015 Amazon Machine Learning, fully managed service announced

2015 AWS Marketplace for Desktop Apps and Amazon WorkSpaces Application Manager

2015 ISVs Go “All-In” with AWS announcement: MicroStrategy, Software AG, TIBCO, and Onshape

May 2015 AWS Educate to Accelerate Cloud Learning in the Classroom

2015 Amazon Solar Farm US East Announced

2015 M4 Instances for Amazon EC2

2015 AWS Opens Second Global “City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge”

2015 AWS 2016 India region pre-announced

2015 AWS Opened Pop-up Loft in New York City

2015 ISVs Go “All-In” with AWS announcement: Looker, Qlik, Sumo Logic, and Works Applications.

2015 AWS Announces Amazon API Gateway

2015 AWS Announces AWS Device Farm

2015 Amazon Wind Farm US East Announced

2015 Amazon Aurora General Availability

2015 AWS Announced Pop-up Lofts opening in London and Berlin

2015 AWS Announced Amazon QuickSight at re:Invent

2015 AWS Announced AWS Snowball and Amazon Kinesis Firehose at re:Invent

2015 AWS Announced AWS Database Migration Service and Amazon RDS for MariaDB at re:Invent

2015 AWS and Accenture Announce the Accenture AWS Business Group

2015 AWS Announced AWS IoT preview at re:Invent

2015 AWS Pre-Announced the AWS UK region to be third in the European Union

2015 Amazon Wind Farm US Central Announced

2015 AWS Announced IoT General Availability

2015 AWS Introduced t2.nano, the smallest and lowest cost Amazon Ec2 instance

2016

2016 AWS launched Korea region as fifth in Asia Pacific (Seoul)

2016 Amazon WorkMail General Availability

2015 AWS pre-announced Canada-Montreal region

2016 AWS Announced Amazon Lumberyard and Amazon GameLift Availability for Game Developers

2016 AWS Announced the AWS Pop-up Loft in Tel Aviv

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