Communications of the ACM
A Rare Peek Into The Massive Scale of Aws
Amazon Web Services is lifting the veil (a bit) on its datacenters and systems.
Credit: EnterpriseTech
The idea behind cloud computing, as pioneer Amazon Web Services believed when it launched its first utility compute and storage products eight years ago, is to abstract away the underlying hardware and provide raw resources to programmers for applications to run on. This hardware is a competitive advantage for AWS, as it has been for its parent online retailer, and that is why AWS very rarely talks about its datacenters and systems. But with Google, Microsoft, and IBM all talking up their investments in cloud and the innovations they have come up with, Amazon has to lift the veil a bit.
The reason is simple. The Amazon online retail business may be a $70 billion behemoth, but it does not throw off a lot of cash. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is not interested in profits as much as he is about transforming the world around him, but the cloud computing business is one of the most capital intensive businesses there are in the world. Thanks to its near monopoly in online search, Google can spend tens of billions of dollars on datacenters and not bat an eyelash. Microsoft, thanks to its near monopoly on desktop software and its dominant position in datacenter software, also has very deep pockets and can spend as much.
From EnterpriseTech
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