Here is my summary of Dr. Werner Volges speech at HackFwd event and you can watch the video at passion meets momentum about Amazon and how it fits into the lean cloud.
In his speech he covered most of the Amazon principals that somehow leads the company to be one of the leaders in cloud services. As he put it in his words: “Amazon is a technology company, we just happened to do retails. And he stated that anything that Amazon does is driven by technology stacks. Amazon started with large scale databases and enterprise applications set up to get big as fast as possible.
As a result few years later, Amazon had to scale the application and re-architecture was required therefore very early on before even anyone talks about SOA, Amazon started to do service oriented architecture and focus on the business logic and make it atomic and encapsulate the data access and change the architecture and move toward applying the concept of SOA into their design. To do this, they started to have smaller teams of 8 to 10 people that they can build services and support their own services as in that way each team had to interact with their customer and understand their needs and the issues that a service can have and communicate better. As a result now Amazon has about 800 services meaning 800 teams!
This type of work environment has its own drawbacks too, as Amazon found most teams are spending majority of their time to manage their infrastructure and do the redundant type of work to fix storage, set up and recover disks and so on, and that was the beginning of Amazon’s cloud services for their internal use.
With having the following principals in mind, Amazon started to build their cloud infrastructure:
- Design for flexibility,
- Design for on-demand,
- Design for automation,
- Being Elastic (To release capacity when it is not needed, or increase the capacity when it is needed.)
- Design for failure,
- Design for utility pricing,
- Break Transparency (To know as a developer where is the metadata stored, and each region to be able to have their data at hand to manage and scale and break the transparency as the user don’t need to know where is the data, but developers have to know.),
- Decomposite into its smallest form,
- Design with security in mind ( As security change and now a days each application is responsible for its security and this will add value to the product and service),
- Don’t do it alone,
- Focus on what doesn’t change and what are the important things to the customers like lower pricing, large catalog and so on so have the values in mind while designing,
- Let your customer benefit,
- Continuously innovative
and as the design got evolved and the demand became high, these principals made Amazon as one of the leaders in cloud services.
And as we see now radical shifts are in place in market. Smaller business who were the original users of the clouds were able to compete with enterprises as each service is on tip of their toe. This means change, as in few years these services become like electricity and it flows. And a new type of thinking is in place, so enterprises has to follow and everything will change.
As everything is accessible and available for use, someone has an idea, it will get developed, and released and evaluated and iterated so we have a faster results come to market, with so many choices of services, tools and everyone needs to follow and stay on top of the game to accelerate and stay lean!