AWS Summit: Amazon CTO Vogels Praises Prices Cuts

Ever-cheaper infrastructure will usher in an age of unfettered innovation, Amazon’s CTO Dr Werner Vogels told the AWS Summit – a road show for Amazon Web Services which hit London today.

“If you can drive down the cost of computing and storage to the point where you no longer need to think about it, the amount of innovation will be tremendous,” he said, arguing that Amazon’s continuous price cuts are creating a climate where customers can try things out with a very low cost of failure.

AWS conquers Mars

“We want to be the world’s most customer-centric service customer,” said Vogels, addressing around 1000 keen AWS customers and IT professionals. “If you do not like the service you should be able to walk away. you should be in charge, not your service provider.”

Ironically, this ambition wasn’t met by AWS Summit itself, thanks to the constraints of the physical world. Getting actual delegates into Islington’s Business Design Centre proved harder than shuffling instances in the cloud, and those who made it inside had to suffer poor-quality conference Wi-Fi and over-load corporate rock music for 45 minutes before Vogels took the stage.

Vogels revealed that Amazon’s ambitions extend beyond Earth in his keynote – NASA puts all the data from its Curiosity Rover, currently in action on Mars, up on Amazon’s cloud storage.

Amongst the services on AWS, he focused on the support for Hadoop clusters for Big Data (AWS now hosts five million of them).

He also reported success for the NoSQL DynamoDB on AWS. For most apps the database is the bottleneck, he said, but DynamoDB is built so users can specify a given performance and the database will reconfigure itself to provide that.

Last week, Amazon launched local secondary queries, making its access almost as sophisticated as a relational database. “It is no longer the database which is falling over – the bottleneck has shifted into the application,” he said.

News International loves AWS

Media businesses figured high up on Vogels’ list of vertical markets well served by AWS, and News International CIO Chris Taylor was the first customer welcomed onto the stage, to discuss how a commitment to AWS had enabled the company to move from a newspaper firm to a multimedia giant – and how the DynamoDB runs the access control system behind the Times’ famous paywall, whereby users must pay to read content on the Times.

Other vertical markets namechecked by Vogels included hospitality and medicine.

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