Speaker Cert II
How is AWS able to innovate so rapidly?
1/Innovation is in our DNA, and our structure and approach to product development and delivery is fundamentally different than other IT vendors. First, we hire builders. And we think of builders as both people who like to look at customer experiences, figure out the pain points, and reinvent them; and then builders who understand that the launch is the starting line, not the finish line. Anything that we have built that's ever worked, we didn't roll it out on day one and have it be an overnight success. You have to keep iterating and listening to customers around what they care about and keep building. 2/We have decentralized, autonomous development teams who are working directly with customers. They are empowered to develop and launch based on what they learn from interactions with customers. We iterate products continuously and the newest and latest is instantly available to customers. No need to upgrade, deploy or migrate. When a feature or enhancement is ready, we "push" it out and it is instantly available to any customer that uses that service. 3/We use the same AWS building blocks and services that our customers do to build our services. Just as for our customers, there's just no question that we build much faster and can be more agile because we use our own building blocks. 4/This approach also enables us to very rapidly introduce and iterate new services. For example, since 2012 we've introduced over 100 major new services which are constantly being enhanced based on customer response, usage and needs. AWS released more than 200 machine learning features and capabilities in 2018.
Tell me more about the AWS Marketplace.
AWS Marketplace is a managed and curated software catalog with an ecommerce storefront, that helps customers innovate faster and reduce costs, by making it easy to find, buy, and immediately deploy and manage 3rd party software. Customers can quickly deploy pre-configured software solutions in a number of deployment modes such as AMIs, SaaS, and Desktop software. Customers pay for only what they use, on their AWS bill. AWS Marketplace features over 35 software categories including Security, Networking, BI, Storage, Databases, Operating Systems, and Business Software. Our selection grows monthly and is in excess of 4,200 listings from over 1,280 sellers.
Once Data is stored in AWS, who owns it?
AWS customers retain ownership and control of their content.
What does AWS do to prevent misuse of AWS services? (Shortened messaging)
AWS employs a number of mitigation techniques, both manual and automated, to prevent the misuse of the services. We have automatic systems in place that detect and block many attacks before they leave our infrastructure. Our terms of usage are clear and when we find misuse we take action quickly and shut it down. Illegal activities across the Internet have been commonplace long before the cloud. Abusers who choose to run their software in an environment like Amazon EC2 make it easier for us to disable their software. This is a significant improvement over the Internet as a whole where abusive hosts can often be inaccessible and run unabated for long periods of time. Additionally, users of Amazon EC2 use the same precautions to secure and protect their websites as they would with traditional hosting solutions. It is no easier for would-be abusers to compromise EC2 based websites than other publicly available websites. We encourage anyone who thinks they see misuse of the service to email [email protected].
What services contribute the most AWS revenue?
AWS has a diverse portfolio of services that contribute to revenue growth.
How does AWS operate under Amazon.com?
AWS is a separate business inside of Amazon with a different customer base, different services, and a different leadership team. - Amazon the retailer is a really large, helpful user of AWS in that they use our services, they're part of the private betas that we do for our services, they give us a lot of feedback, they have very high standards and they're not shy about communicating what they like and what they don't like and what they want. -Any team that's been part of building a successful service will tell you that they need a large number of sophisticated, large, high standards users to keep pushing the offering and Amazon the retailer has been one of them. Although they're really just one of several large, helpful, important users of AWS.
What is AWS's position on sustainability?
AWS is committed to running our business in the most environmentally friendly way possible. Our scale allows us to achieve higher resource utilization and energy efficiency than the typical on-premises data center. In addition to the environmental benefits inherently associated with running applications in the cloud, AWS is committed to achieving 100% renewable energy usage for our global infrastructure. To achieve this goal, we focus on four complementary areas: increasing energy efficiency in our facilities and equipment, continuous innovation in our data centers, advocacy at the global, federal, and state levels to create a favorable environment for renewable energy, and working with various power providers around the world to increase the availability of renewable energy. AWS exceeded 50% renewable energy usage for 2018. In April, AWS announced three new wind farms. These projects - one in Ireland, one in Sweden, and one in the United States - will total over 229 megawatts (MW), with expected generation of over 670,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of renewable energy annually. Once complete, these wind farms, combined with AWS's nine previous renewable energy projects, are expected to generate more than 2,700,000 MWh of renewable energy annually - equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of over 262,000 US homes, approximately the size of the city of Nashville, Tennessee. To stay up to date on AWS & Sustainability, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/sustainability/. To understand how Amazon is leveraging renewable energy in its facilities along with other sustainability efforts, see: https://www.aboutamazon.com/sustainability.
How was AWS started?
After over a decade of building and running the highly scalable web application, Amazon.com, the company realized that it had developed a core competency in operating massive scale technology infrastructure and data centers, and embarked on a much broader mission of serving a new customer segment—developers and businesses—with web services they can use to build sophisticated, scalable applications. Today, AWS is the fastest-growing multi-billion enterprise IT vendor in the world.
There have been a number of news stories recently about AWS customers having sensitive data exposed because their Amazon S3 buckets were configured to allow public access - why does this keep happening?
Amazon S3 is secure by default. If customers use the default configuration, the bucket locks down access to just the account owner and root administrator. More than a million customers use Amazon S3 safely and securely. A core tenet of AWS since the very start has been to allow builders the flexibility to a change our default configurations to suit whatever style of app they're constructing. Public websites or publicly downloadable content, for example, requires buckets to be configured with world read access. As is the case on-premises or anywhere else, when you set a new access control configuration, an application builder needs to ensure that it protects access the way that they intended. We have a number of services (like AWS CloudTrail to audit access and other operations on AWS resources like Amazon S3 buckets and Amazon Macie, a security service that uses ML to recognize sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII) or intellectual property, and provides dashboards and alerts that give visibility into how this data is being accessed or moved) that help customers audit and consider their configuration changes, and we will continue to add capabilities that give customers additional ways to triple check their customizations.
There is a lot of concern around security and privacy of customer data. If AWS gets a request to hand over data, what will you do? Alt version of the question: I know that the CIA and NSA are AWS customers, do they have access to all of your customer's data?
Amazon and AWS are vigilant about our customers' privacy and have implemented sophisticated technical and physical measures to prevent unauthorized access. We have a world-class team of security experts monitoring our systems 24/7 to protect customer content. - We will not disclose customer content in response to requests unless required to do so to comply with a legally valid and binding order, such as a subpoena or a court order. - Additionally, when possible we would notify the customer before disclosing their content so they could seek protection from disclosure. - It's also important to point out that customers can choose to encrypt their content as part of a standard security process for highly sensitive content. AWS provides tools customers can use to encrypt their data at rest or in motion, or customers can choose from a number of supported 3rd party security solutions. Content that has been encrypted is rendered useless without the applicable decryption keys.
Why does AWS continue to be the leader in cloud? (Also: why do customers choose AWS over other providers?)
Customers are choosing AWS over other providers because it has a lot more functionality, the largest and most vibrant community of customers and partners, the most proven operational and security expertise, and the business is innovating at a faster clip - especially in new areas such as Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, and Serverless Computing 1/AWS has more services, and more features within those services, than any other cloud provider - by a large amount. AWS is also innovating faster than anyone else, and that gap in capability continues to expand. In 2011, we released over 80 new significant services and features, followed by nearly 160 in 2012; 280 in 2013; 516 in 2014; 722 in 2015; 1,017 in 2016; 1,430 in 2017; and 1,957 in 2018. [March 1, 2019] 2/With millions of active customers and tens of thousands of partners globally, AWS has the largest and most dynamic ecosystem. There is a real network effect when you use AWS. Customers across virtually every industry and of every size, including start-ups, enterprises, and public sector organizations, are running every imaginable use case on AWS. And, every AWS customer has the opportunity to benefit from all of the collaboration and feedback AWS gets from customers. And, when you look at AWS's partner network, it is not just the thousands of systems integrators who built practices around AWS, but most ISVs and SaaS providers will adapt their technology to work on one technology infrastructure platform. Some will do two, very few will have the time to do three. And they all start with AWS, because we have such a significant market segment leadership position. AWS has unmatched experience, maturity, reliability, security, and performance. Internally, we say that there's no compression algorithm for experience, and that's because you can't learn certain lessons until you get to different milestones in scale. With millions of active customers every month, AWS has many times the usage of other cloud providers who just haven't learned those lessons yet.
How is AWS different from other technology providers?
Customers have come to really appreciate that the AWS culture is really different. If a startup, enterprise, or government agency is going to partner with an infrastructure provider, it's typically a long-term decision they're making, and they really want to understand what's unique about the culture, or the partner that they are choosing. There are three things that are different about AWS: 1/We're unusually customer-focused. And a lot of companies say this. Very few walk that walk. Most of the big technology companies are competitor-focused. They look at what the competitors are doing, and they try to one-up the competitors. That can be a very successful strategy, it's just not ours. 90% of what we build is driven by what customers tell us matters, and the other 10% are things we hear from customers where they may not articulate exactly what they want, but we try to read between the lines and invent on their behalf. 2/We're pioneers. Most large technology companies have lost their will and DNA to invent. They acquire most of their innovation. And again, it's a strategy that can work, it's just not ours. We like to hire builders who look at customer experiences that are flawed, then figure out how to reinvent those. In a space that's moving as fast as the cloud is, to be partnered with the company that has the most functionality, that's iterating the quickest, has the largest community, had the vision for cloud from the start without having to patch together acquisitions, that's very attractive. 3/We're unusually long-term oriented. You won't see our folks show up at customers' doors a day before the end of the quarter or the day before the end of the year and try to harass them into a sale, not to be seen again for a year. We're trying to build relationships and a business that lasts longer than all of us in this room. And you do that by doing right by customers over a long period of time. This is why, in part, Intuit named AWS their supplier of their year, and Splunk named us their alliance partner of the year a couple of years in a row now. They'll tell you we partner in a different way. An example that ties this all together is a capability in our support function called AWS Trusted Advisor. We'll look at customers' utilization of our resources, and if they're low or idle, we'll reach out to them and say, maybe you don't want to spend this money right now. Over the last couple years, we've used AWS Trusted Advisor to tell customers how to spend less money with us, leading to hundreds of millions of dollars in savings for our customers every year. And so I ask you, how many technology companies call up their customers and say, stop spending money with us? Not too many. When we first started doing this, people thought it was a gimmick, but if you understand our culture, it makes perfect sense, because we don't want to make money from customers unless they're getting value. We want to reinvent an experience that hasn't been a very good one for customers over the last several decades, and we're trying to build a long-term business that outlasts all of us, and you do that by doing right by customers over a long period of time.
Should customers be running multi-Region (vs. multi-AZ) if they want the highest availability?
Each of our regions is architected with multiple availability zones to protect data durability and service availability. They're even architected to be able to withstand the loss of physical infrastructure. This has allowed our regional services like DynamoDB and S3 to achieve high availability. That said, there are things you can do to architect for higher and higher availability.
How does AWS handle my sensitive data (is it safe to store my sensitive data in AWS if another Amazon business is a competitors)?
First, AWS customer data is never accessed or used by the Amazon retail business. AWS customers have complete control over who can access their data. AWS provides a robust set of tools to ensure that customer data cannot be accessed by anyone without appropriate permissions. - AWS is the industry leader in providing its customer with robust security technology and services. AWS is vigilant about its customers' privacy and data security and has ensured that , since day one, AWS customer have always retained ownership and control of their content. As well as the ability to encrypt it, protect it,. and delete it in alignment with their organization's security policies. - AWS's extensive security technologies, 24x7 monitoring and alerting, and rigorous attention to all aspects of securing AWS's infrastrcuture services are designed to ensure that customers' data can only be used by them.
How much will AWS - and the market - move beyond infrastructure to higher-level services like PaaS?
From a services and feature perspective, we are seeing a growing demand in areas like Application Services and Analytics. For example, we are seeing very strong demand for WorkSpaces, our new Desktop as a Service Solution, in the Application Services space. We are also seeing increasing demand in the Analytics space for services like Kinesis, which is our real-time analytics service that can be used to generate and process data coming from the internet of things (IoT). And, we introduced WorkDocs, our fully managed, secure enterprise storage and sharing service that improves user productivity. Each of these solutions were built to solve a customer need. So, as we look to the future, you will continue to see us invest in areas, like these, where there is a large customer need.
Where have you announced new AWS Regions?
I can confirm that we will have three more Regions in Bahrain, Italy, and South Africa before the first half of 2020. I have no additional details to share at this time.
Will AWS get into the SaaS space?
If you look at the 100+ services that we've built over the last ten years, AWS is a very broad, robust technology offering. You will increasingly see us build services a little bit further up the stack, and the ones we choose to add are the ones that our customers tell us they'd like us to build. For example, our data warehousing service, Amazon RedShift, or virtual desktops in the cloud with Amazon WorkSpaces, or our hosted secure Exchange-compatible email service with WorkMail, or our enterprise storage and collaboration service with WorkDocs. The vast majority of applications, including SaaS applications that are the most successful in the market today are from AWS partners running on top of AWS. Splunk, Infor, Informatica, Pegasystems, Aquia, Tibco, or IMS Health, all run their SaaS applications exclusively on top of AWS. In 2016, Salesforce announced that they will run their core application on top of AWS, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, App Cloud, Community Cloud, Analytics Cloud. So, we have a very broad set of applications that run on top of AWS that our customers love using. Some are ones that we've built, and many are ones that are partners have built.
What large AWS customers compete with Amazon businesses?
Most of Amazon's consumer competitors use AWS with Netflix, Nordstrom, and Hulu being prominent examples. The vast majority of Amazon's retail competitors use AWS. Many we don't have permission to reference. - There are two reasons why these companies choose AWS: 1) We have a much more capable platform than anybody else, and 2) because they have seen that they are just as important to AWS as Amazon's is, we treat them this way. We very consciously want any company, regardless of industry, to be able to use our platform to build and run their business. This is why we've been so disciplined and vigilant about making sure that while Amazon is a very important external customer, they are treated just like any other external customer.
Does the launch of [service name, e.g. Amazon DocumentDB, Amazon QuickSight, Amazon WorkDocs] mean you are now competing with your Consulting Partners and Technology Partners [e.g. MongoDB, Qliq, Tibco, Tableau, Box, Dropbox]?
Most of these technology spaces are so large, and they have so much opportunity, that there isn't going to be just one winner. There is opportunity for multiple companies to be successful, especially those that are using the cloud to reinvent many of these important areas. - When we develop offering (or move 'up the stack') it's really driven by customers asking us to have that capability. When customer have asked us for offerings in certain spaces where others already have solutions, almost always our offering is less developed and might not have the same functionality. They also might have very different customer experiences because these spaces are so broad. And, if other companies are building businesses where customer are happy with their products and they continue to innovate, they'll have successful businesses whether AWS has an offering there or not. - For example: We launched Cloudwatch and New Relic is still flourishing. We launched EMR, and Cloudera and Hortonworks continue to do well We launched Cloudwatch Logs, and Splunk continue to thrive
When companies get to a certain size, does it make sense for them to move off of AWS, like Dropbox?
No. Majority of startups that start on AWS, stay with AWS as they get bigger. - Netflix, Lyft, Stripe, Airbnb - AWS provides such a strong value proposition for companies of all sizes that there isn't a segment that doesn't get a lot of benefit from staying and growing on AWS. - There are constantly new breakout start-ups that are building a significant part of their business on AWS
Do critics have a point? Is Amazon getting too big?
No. We're a small part of the nearly $23 trillion global retail market. - There are many successful competitors in every country where we operate and there always will be. - In 20 years, there hasn't been a single day without intense competition. That won't change. Global retail is going to continue to grow, there's a ton of green field ahead, and there will continue to be lots of winners.
Are retailers leaving AWS (e.g. Target) based on noise made by Walmart, others?
Not really. There are some companies who are taking a more competitive or inward-facing view versus prioritizing what might give them the most technology capabilities. - Retailers: GoPro, Shutterfly, Brooks Brothers - The reason that so many retailers continue to take the long view is that they want to use the technology infrastructure platform that gives them the most functionality, the greatest agility, and the best security and performance. AWS is the clear leader in these areas. - Retailers' end users don't care about any rivalry that may exist with another retailer. In this fast-moving world, end users care about whether the customer experience is evolving quickly enough to warrant their doing business with that retailer. Speed and capability matter a lot.
Does AWS do PaaS?
People use the term PaaS to describe many different things, but if you think about the broad definition - a service offering for developers that automatically deploys and manages applications and systems - then we have a rich set of capabilities. - For application centric development we support Java, Node, Python, Ruby, PHP, .NET and Docker workloads on AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon EC2 Container Service. We have AWS Mobile Hub and Amazon Cognito which streamlines backend capabilities for mobile applications. For data-centric development AWS offers fully managed relational databases (Amazon RDS for MySQL, Postgres, SQL Server and more), non-relational databases (Amazon DynamoDB), in memory data grids (Amazon ElastiCache), event processing (Lambda) and Hadoop as a Service (Amazon EMR). If a developer has a workload that does not fit into any of those models, we also have a complete set of tools that will help them automate their build (CloudFormation, Code Pipelines), deployment (CodeDeploy), API management (Amazon API Gateway) and operations. - These capabilities and their broad adoption by our customers are some of the reasons why IDC rates AWS as a market leader in the PaaS market segment and why Gartner describes AWS as having "the richest array of IaaS features and PaaS-like capabilities."
How are enterprises using AWS?
Really, enterprises across every business segment are using AWS in a meaningful way. • In financial services: Capital One, Intuit, HSBC, Barclays • In healthcare, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Pfizer, Novartis, Bristol Myers Squibb • In oil & gas, Shell, BP, Hess, Haliburton • In manufacturing, GE, Philips, Schneider Electric, Siemens • In travel and hospitality, Expedia, Singapore Air, Korean Air, Hilton Hotels • In media, Netflix, HBO, Turner, Disney, and Twenty-First Century Fox.
What is AWS' stance on privacy?
Regardless of where a request for customer content comes from, we are vigilant about our customers' privacy and have implemented sophisticated technical and physical measures to prevent unauthorized access. - We have a world-class team of security experts monitoring our systems 24/7 to protect customer content. We will not disclose customer content in response to requests unless required to do so to comply with a legally valid and binding order, such as a subpoena or a court order. - Additionally, we would notify the customer before disclosing their content so they could seek protection from disclosure, unless prohibited by law. - It's also important to point out that customers can choose to encrypt their content as part of a standard security process for highly sensitive content. AWS provides tools customers can use to encrypt their data at rest or in motion, or customers can choose from a number of supported 3rd party security solutions. Content that has been encrypted is rendered useless without the applicable decryption keys.
With AWS innovating so quickly, how can customers and partners possibly expect to keep up?
The customers I talk to love our pace of innovation, it's one of the key reasons they choose AWS over other cloud providers. - We do have several training and support offerings for our customers to help them ramp up on new services: Training and Certifications; Bootcamps; events like the Global Summit Series and re:Invent; to direct interaction with AWS through a Technical Account Manager, a Solutions Architect, or AWS Professional Services. - There are also hundreds of System Integrators that can help customer deploy and manage new solutions. While customer appreciate that all new features are automatically available for them - there is no need to download or install new software - they are also not forced into using (and paying for) any specific set of services.
What are you doing to retain and recruit talent in this highly competitive market?
The most important thing, and it's true where there is competition from other companies or not, is you want to hire people that fit your culture. And for us, that's builders. - We disproportionately index and hire builders. By builders, we mean people who like to invent, people who like to look at different customer experiences and assess what's wrong with them and reinvent them, and people who get that launch is the starting line, not the finish line. - Anything you want to do that's going to be successful long-term, you have to listen to what the customers tel you is important and keep iterating that. So, you want to hire what fits with your culture, which are builders for us, and then you want to actually make it a place where builders can build. - If you look across Amazon, and you look at the amount of building and the amount of inventing, all the customer at the center of that, along with our long-term orientation, it's a place that builders love to be. There's no better place to build.
What is cloud computing?
The term "cloud computing" refers to the on-demand delivery of IT resources via the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. - Instead of buying, owning and maintaining your own data centers and servers, organizations can acquire technology such as compute power, storage, databases, and other services on an as-needed basis. It is similar to how consumers flip a switch to turn on lights in their home and the power company sends electricity. -With cloud computing, AWS manages and maintains the technology infrastructure in a secure environment and businesses access these resources via the Internet to develop and run their applications. Capacity can grow or shrink instantly and businesses only pay for what they use.
What are the advantages of moving to the AWS cloud?
There are five reasons companies are moving so quickly to the AWS cloud. The first is agility. AWS lets customers quickly spin up resources as they need them, deploying hundreds or even thousands of servers in minutes. This means they can very quickly develop and roll out new applications, and it means teams can experiment and innovate more quickly and frequently. If an experiment fails, you can always de-provision those servers without risk. The second reason is cost savings. If you look at how people end up moving to the cloud, almost always the conversation starter ends up being cost. AWS allows customers to trade capital expense for variable expense, paying for IT as they consume it. And, the variable expense is much lower than what customers can do for themselves because of AWS's economies of scale. For example, Dow Jones has estimated that migrating its data centers to AWS will contribute to a global savings of $100 million in infrastructure costs. The third reason is elasticity. Customers used to over provision to ensure they had enough capacity to handle their business operations at the peak level of activity. Now, they can provision the amount of resources that they actually need, knowing they can instantly scale up or down along with the needs of their business, which also reduces cost and improves the customer's ability to meet their user's demands. The fourth reason is that the cloud allows customers to innovate faster because they can focus their highly valuable IT resources on developing applications that differentiate their business and transform customer experiences instead of the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing infrastructure and data centers. The fifth reason is that AWS enables customers to deploy globally in minutes. AWS has the concept of a Region, which is a physical location around the world where we cluster data centers. We call each group of logical data centers an Availability Zone. Using AWS, customers can leverage 61 Availability Zones across 20 geographic regions worldwide. And, we don't plan to stop there.
How many employees does AWS have?
Thousands. And I can tell you we are hiring globally across our business as quickly as we can to keep up with the growth that we are experiencing.
How does AWS's reliability compare with competitors?
We believe we have meaningfully stronger operational performance than other providers. We have more than a decade of experience, and we have a much larger volume of usage. - As Gartner noted in their IaaS Magic Quadrant AWS has the largest share of compute capacity in use by paying customers - many times the aggregate size of all other cloud providers in the market segment. So, when you have a lot more usage volume, you have a lot more opportunity for issues. And our performance over the last eleven years has been strong. It's a maturity thing. If you look at some of the issues other providers had this year, you would see global service disruptions that lasted for days.
What percentage of your business is federal customers?
We don't break out those numbers, but I can tell you government adoption of AWS has grown quickly. We have a rapidly growing team in the Washington D.C. area and we're really excited to be hiring and adding to our team that works closely with our government customers. Many government agencies are currently using AWS, and we're working with a large number of additional government customers who are looking to achieve the benefits of cloud computing and to acquire the technology resources needed for their mission-critical applications.
What are your plans for global expansion?
We have 21 regions around the world today, and we're not close to being done. We also have an additional three Regions in Bahrain, Italy, and South Africa coming online before the first half of 2020. There's a very, very large opportunity for cloud computing internationally and you can expect that we'll continue to add Regions.
What involvement does AWS have with US intelligence services?
We provide standard, commercial AWS services to government agencies around the world, some of which include intelligence agencies. These government agencies use AWS in the same manner as other AWS customers and no customer, regardless if they are an intelligence service of the U.S. or any other country, has access to any other customers' content stored on AWS.
When are you going to open a region in [country]?
We're constantly getting feedback from customers on where they would like the next AWS Region and have a long list of target countries [and U.S. locations] that we are looking at. We're always re-evaluating and reprioritizing that list and [Country/U.S. location] is just one of the many possibilities that we are currently looking at. In the fullness of time you can expect AWS Regions in multiple major countries and U.S. locations around the world.
Why is AWS growing so fast?
We're going through a shift in technology that is unlike any other in our lifetime, and it's happening at a startling pace - much faster than anybody anticipated. The AWS cloud allows companies and organizations to focus on what really differentiates their organizations - such as analyzing petabytes of data, delivering video content, building great mobile apps or even exploring Mars - and leave the heavy lifting of the underlying technology infrastructure to AWS. Whether it's regulated data storage for financial services companies such as [FINRA and Intuit], clinical trial simulations with [Bristol Myers-Squibb], financial market big data analytics for the [SEC], streaming movies and original series for [Netflix], or operational support for [NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory] missions, successful customer implementations on AWS are accelerating. Every imaginable business segment is using AWS in a very meaningful way.
Aren't most companies adopting a multi-cloud approach? (Alt. Question: What is Amazon's position on multi-cloud strategies?)
When we talk to enterprise or public sector CIOs, most of them start off believing that they're going to split their workloads in the cloud relatively evenly among two or three providers. But when they get into the practicality and the rigor of assessing it, very few end up going that route. Most predominantly pick one provider. The reasons that they don't spread it evenly are a few-fold. 1/This forces them to standardize on the lowest common denominator, and these platforms are in widely different spots at this point. AWS just has so much more functionality than anybody else; a much larger, more mature community of service providers, software developers, software solutions, and systems integrators; and a much more mature platform, because we've been operating six to seven years longer. 2/Also, it's a big transition to go from on-premises to the cloud. And if you force teams not only to make that transition, but then on top of it to have to be fluent in multiple cloud platforms, it's tough. Development teams hate it, and it's pretty wasteful in terms of resources. 3/Then the third thing is that all these cloud providers have volume discounts, and so if you spread your workloads amongst them, you are losing your ability to get buying power in terms of these volume discounts. So, the vast majority of customers predominantly pick an infrastructure provider. But, for those that are worried about getting locked in or wanting to make sure if something goes sideways that they have the ability to switch, they will run a small percentage of their workloads with a second provider. This is just so they know they can do it, and they have experience, and they've built that relationship -- and also for comparison purposes.
How do you choose your next Region?
Where we locate our Regions is based on a combination of factors. We consider locations in terms of how much geographic area we can cover, to give customers low latency when running applications, the availability of renewable energy, and the local government's long-term commitment to investing in technology infrastructure. We also look at countries with data sovereignty preferences where, for whatever reason, customers are less likely to consume services when the infrastructure is not operated from within their country, such as Germany. There are a number of other factors we consider, but if you look at the size of the area that we touch in our business including, infrastructure software, hardware, and data center services, these are trillions of dollars worldwide, both short and long term. And if you look at the amount of computing that's being done in each major country of the world, it probably warrants having multiple Regions not just in the U.S., but in Europe, and in other Asian and Latin American countries. We're far from being done adding Regions.
How does innovation allow you to drive costs down?
While most customers are aware of our accelerating pace of innovation in the many new services and features we launch every week, innovation also permeates every aspect of AWS operations. Behind the scenes, we are continuously enhancing reliability, performance, and efficiency of our operations through extensive use of custom-designed data center architectures, networking, and equipment. Additionally, we are actively innovating maintenance and management activities by increasing the software automation we use to help run our services. This innovation helps to make our staff more productive and equipment to more easily scale, further driving down the costs of operating our business.
Is the AWS Cloud secure?
Yes and security will always be our top priority. Examining the AWS cloud, you'll see that the same security isolations are employed as would be found in a traditional data center. These include physical data center security, separation of the network, isolation of the server hardware, and isolation of storage. We have a shared responsibility model with the customer; AWS manages and controls the components from the host operating system and virtualization layer down to the physical security of the facilities in which the services operate, and AWS customers are responsible for building secure applications. We provide a wide variety of best practices documents, encryption tools, and other guidance our customers can leverage in delivering application-level security measures. In addition, AWS partners offer hundreds of tools and features to help customers to meet their security objectives, ranging from network security, configuration management, access control, and data encryption. One of the great things about cloud is that AWS customers inherit all the best practices of AWS policies, architecture, and operational processes built to satisfy the requirements of our most security sensitive customers.
Is the AWS Cloud reliable enough for mission critical business applications?
Yes, as evidenced by the large number of startups, enterprises, and government organizations that are running mission critical applications on AWS - including large web sites, e-commerce applications, SAP deployments, scientific analysis, and financial services risk simulations. - Overall, customers have told us that AWS has provided them with strong operational performance over many years - and in many cases higher uptime than they achieved in their own data centers with the same applications. Amazon has spent over a decade building one of the world's most reliable, secure, scalable, and cost-efficient web infrastructures to run Amazon.com and we bring that experience with us to AWS. Our operational performance has been quite strong since 2006 and is one of the key reasons we've grown as quickly as we have. Still, we remain focused and driven to remove any and all causes of failure. Our goal remains to make our operational performance indistinguishable from perfect, so we drop everything when we feel like it isn't where it needs to be.
Are AWS features and services reliable?
Yes, the services are very reliable and are one of the main reasons our business has grown as fast as it has. Amazon has spent over a decade building one of the world's most reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient web infrastructures to run Amazon.com. Still, I can tell you that security and operational performance are our top priorities. We drop everything when we feel like one of these isn't where it needs to be. AWS builds its data centers in multiple geographic regions as well as across multiple Availability Zones within each region to offer maximum resiliency against system disruption. AWS designs its data centers with significant excess bandwidth connections so that if a major disruption occurs there is sufficient capacity to enable traffic to be load-balanced to the remaining sites, minimizing the impact on customers. AWS provides availability SLA's of 100% for Amazon Route 53, 99.9% for Amazon CloudFront and Amazon S3, 99.95% for Amazon RDS, and 99.99% for Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, and Amazon Fargate for Amazon ECS, and up to 99% for S3 Standard-IA. In addition, we provide a Service Health Dashboard that shows the current operational status of each of our services in real-time, so that our uptime and performance are fully transparent.
Are there any companies that run their entire infrastructure on AWS?
Yes, there are a number of companies that are running - or in the process of moving - their entire infrastructure to AWS. Although most enterprises typically build a two-to-four-year migration plan, if you look at the amount of enterprise migration to AWS, it's very substantial. Recent customers who have announced going 'all-in' on AWS in the past year alone include: Korean Air, Ellie Mae, Pac-12 Conference, Epic Games, Ryanair, Shutterfly, Cox Automotive, GoDaddy, GoGo, Lyft, and Choice Hotels.
What is the status of Amazon's move off Oracle databases?
• As of November 1st 2018, the Amazon team shut off the last Oracle data warehouse and Amazon now runs on Amazon Redshift, which is an AWS service. • As of the end of 2018, 88% of all databases are off Oracle and running on Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Aurora. This represents 97% of Amazon's mission critical databases, which is pretty amazing progress. • As of March 2019, the Amazon Fulfillment teams completed 100% of the migration off Oracle. - Having gone through moving off Oracle databases ourselves, we have a lot of customers interested in learning from our experience. We're excited to share that experience so customers can get better price performance from their databases.
