Supernova 2007: because technology is everyone's business

Friday, June 23, 2006

Perspective: Werner Vogels, Amazon

Werner Vogels, , shows us the Amazon enterprise. Here are the highlights:

Look at the NBA Store. This is running on the Amazon.com platform. When you go through checkout, you can use your Amazon ID. Not every story that runs on the Amazon uses the Amazon ID. There is a lot of mishing and mashing going on.

If you need to build a new application, you want to drive traffic there, you need to make sure it always stays up, and it needs to survive a complete data center outage without any impact to the customer.

Whether you’re building Web 2.0 or traditional website, you first need to build a robust infrastructure. No piece of the infrastructure is unbreakable. You need to be able to deal with it when it cracks.

The Amazon business model starts with selection. If it’s good for the customer, you can get traffic, lower your cost structure, lower your prices, have more sellers, get more customers.

In 1995 Amazon had 1 million books in store. That was the selection part. Now, there are other merchants who sell on the Amazon platform. In fairness, if their prices are lower than Amazon’s, they get preferred space on the page. Discovery of their products is also improved because of Amazon’s long tail.

Amazon’s continuous growth is fueled by ultra-scalable technology. Every year, we scale the technology. Internally, it is now a service-oriented architecture. That is the platform we built our applications on.

What does scalability really mean? It means that if you add resources to the system, performance needs to increase proportionately. It also means being able to handle larger data sets. If you have to add nodes to the system, the performance of the system should not suffer.

If new nodes are faster and bigger, you should be able to exploit that. The more nodes you add, the less people you should need to maintain them.

Amazon went through stages where all of these things were not true.

Target was the first customer of the enterprise services. Our interaction with Target made us realize Amazon could be a platform, not just an application. Now we have content generation and discovery; identity management; order processing, payments and fraud protection; fulfillment and customer service; and product offers and management.

Amazon enterprise is always on, scalable, cost-effective.

The traditional Amazon web services were built using Amazon data. Other applications have been built on top, e.g., backup manager, that use data belonging to others.