AWS

AWS is Amazon's Cloud offering and is spectacular success story

Topics to cover and ideas

• What is it
• History
• How it made Amazon the powerhouse it is today
• Key technologies
  • route 53
  • EC2
  • S3
  • Container Service
  • Lambda
• why the cloud revolution happened (why were they so successful)
  • the failure of sysops data centers to modernise
    • no scalability, failed to modernise, no shared resources, tool expensive, no shared learnings, insecure
  • the cost of installing one server (£2k to £5k in large companies)
  • vs the cost of spinning up entire racks (programmatically)

• AWS today is as complex as an OS (windows or linux). It can only be managed in a programmatic way. But today the testing capabilities of AWS and other cloud providers is still very low (namely on end-to-end tests and configurations changes)

• If you don't have an AWS or Azure or Google Cloud account, what are you wait for? All have really generous free tiers that allow you to try a large number of their capabilities for free. And as long as you shut down everything everyday, the costs shouldn't be that high.

• AWS is what happens when a tech team becomes so good that is able to provide those services to 3rd parties

  • think about this, Amazon.co.uk is getting their IT and development costs paid by 3rd party companies (some direct competitors with Amazon)
  • https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/011316/what-amazon-web-services-and-why-it-so-successful.asp
  • https://qz.com/1051814/what-is-amazon-really/
  • Amazon in 2011 was shipping to production every 10s (http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/60/Velocity%20Culture%20Presentation.pdf)

The amazon machine

• how amazon become one of the best development houses in the world
• https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/12/12/the-amazon-machine (great article that talks about the Amazon machine, which is the real power behind it)