The end of a private server seems to be on the horizon

It is no secret that online retailing giant Amazon's ambitions in the public computing business. Now they go further and strive to build an infrastructure that is far more than all kinds of private data centers, hoping to become the ideal carrier for Web applications. ...

The end of a private server seems to be on the horizon

It is no secret that online retailing giant Amazon's ambitions in the public computing business. Now they go further and strive to build an infrastructure that is far more than all kinds of private data centers, hoping to become the ideal carrier for Web applications.

Although the tone is not small, most people obviously did not take Amazon's rhetoric too seriously. Now, however, with the use of their online stores, users can already deploy the apps they buy to Amazon's Web services (AWS) cloud. In this situation, we seem to have to look at Amazon and its cloud platform.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels points out that there are now 100,000 companies running all or part of their day-to-day business through AWS. These corporate users are in more than 190 countries, with Amazon users in almost every corner of the world.

"Our user groups are mainly made up of top internet companies," Vogels in a keynote address at the New York AWS Summit, with a data graph showing numerous international front-line companies that chose Amazon as their platform for their applications. "Over the past 1.5 years, we've seen the rapid growth of AWS customer groups, and their real business has covered almost all industries," he said. ”

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels

To illustrate the popularity of the AWS Service project, Vogels shows the number and peak of service objects for the simple storage service (i.e. S3) cloud, which was previously disclosed by El Reg website. S3 cloud storage object to break through the trillion mark is only a matter of time, and performance is quite good. At the end of the first quarter, the S3 cloud already had more than 900 billion of cross-domain storage objects, while AWS's object execution requests reached a peak of 650,000.

"I am very confident that there will be more exciting business growth in the future," Vogels made clear, and his predictions are likely to become reality.

Although Amazon has introduced automatic expiration and object deletion for the S3 service last year, the overall business curve is still quite robust. The El reg Web site makes a statistic of the overall storage data, and the following graph represents the floating of objects that have been stored since this quarter. Each of these diamond points represents the actual number of objects stored at that point in time:

S3: Brave and diligent in the rising road

Amazon has not yet released detailed data on its EC2 computing cloud, and the information on resilient block storage services is still unknown, but I believe both are more important and attractive in the enterprise-class workload arena. Amazon also did not talk about the number of customers in AWS and the revenues and profits the company received from the cloud unit. But as emc-vmware approaches, one day the pair will start a skirmish, and the news of AWS will be known to us (and, of course, the opposite, since Amazon's shareholders are technically the owner of AWS).

"We are trying to break the traditional paradigm of enterprise software development," Vogels, who once again reiterated his core philosophy to participants who did not understand AWS. "The core of the business model of the previous generation was the contract, which was the main drawback to the long-term stranglehold of corporate users – because at the time, revising the contract content was the only way to reduce costs." More importantly, in order to ensure the smooth implementation of the leasing contract, we have to keep in touch with the supplier at all times. ”

"But now it's different, and if we can't deliver quality services that are consistent with commitments, customers can opt out at any time." As users of these services, we are able to maintain a constant focus and control over every detail. This is the core of our business philosophy. And under this premise, as long as customers with us to maintain cooperation, then the scale of the economy brought about by the benefits and platform operating experience to provide the efficiency of the progress will be effectively reflected in each customer's actual business. ”

Vogels added that this is why AWS has been able to cut fees 19 times in a variety of services--currently offering more than 30 services, covering a range of areas ranging from computing and storage to databases, load balancing, and application framework work services. Amazon's latest price cut came in early March this year, leaving some S3 customers with a direct 40% drop in their cost of use, while some EC2 users received a 32% discount.

"Why are we doing this?" Vogels sold A. "Because we believe that in order to become a strong in the market, we must actively help our customers succeed." Customers succeed, we will also be in the long-term perspective to obtain a variety of benefits. This is a very healthy and benign development model for both sides of our cooperation. ”

At the end of the keynote speech, Selipsky, the vice president of AWS Marketing, product management, and technical support, represented Amazon, making a fairly deep summary of the cloud's prospects.

"We think that when the time is right--and of course it won't mature in a short time--cloud computing will completely replace proprietary and business-centric data centers," Selipsky. "I don't know if the overall situation is going to take five, ten or 20 years, and since the process of transition involves multifaceted issues and technical co-ordination, it can be sure that it will take a considerable amount of time." ”

This, in the view of Selipsky and his cloud business team, is one of the reasons Amazon's cloud is faster than the traditional development cycle of other IT vendors in the development cycle-for AWS, the 18, 24, or 36-month development cycle is simply unacceptable. Only the new function of the product is always tested, and the existing services to strengthen and consolidate, in order to truly meet the needs of customer use. This is Amazon's operating path, I believe that every successful enterprise is essential to the core business philosophy.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)