Core Messaging Flashcards
What is cloud computing?
The term “cloud computing” refers to the on-demand delivery of IT resources via the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning and maintaining your own data centers and servers, organizations can acquire technology such as compute power, storage, databases, and other services on an as-needed basis. It is similar to how consumers flip a switch to turn on lights in their home and the power company sends electricity. With cloud computing, AWS manages and maintains the technology infrastructure in a secure environment and businesses access these resources via the Internet to develop and run their applications. Capacity can grow or shrink instantly and businesses only pay for what they use.
How was AWS started?
After over a decade of building and running the highly scalable web application, Amazon.com, the company realized that it had developed a core competency in operating massive scale technology infrastructure and data centers, and embarked on a much broader mission of serving a new customer segment—developers and businesses—with web services they can use to build sophisticated, scalable applications. Today, AWS is the fastest-growing multi-billion enterprise IT vendor in the world.
What are the advantages of moving to the AWS cloud?
There are five reasons companies are moving so quickly to the AWS cloud.
The first is agility. AWS lets customers quickly spin up resources as they need them, deploying hundreds or even thousands of servers in minutes. This means they can very quickly develop and roll out new applications, and it means teams can experiment and innovate more quickly and frequently. If an experiment fails, you can always de-provision those servers without risk.
The second reason is cost savings. If you look at how people end up moving to the cloud, almost always the conversation starter ends up being cost. AWS allows customers to trade capital expense for variable expense, paying for IT as they consume it. And, the variable expense is much lower than what customers can do for themselves because of AWS’s economies of scale. For example, Dow Jones has estimated that migrating its data centers to AWS will contribute to a global savings of $100 million in infrastructure costs.
The third reason is elasticity. Customers used to over provision to ensure they had enough capacity to handle their business operations at the peak level of activity. Now, they can provision the amount of resources that they actually need, knowing they can instantly scale up or down along with the needs of their business, which also reduces cost and improves the customer’s ability to meet their user’s demands.
The fourth reason is that the cloud allows customers to innovate faster because they can focus their highly valuable IT resources on developing applications that differentiate their business and transform customer experiences instead of the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing infrastructure and data centers.
The fifth reason is that AWS enables customers to deploy globally in minutes. AWS has the concept of a Region, which is a physical location around the world where we cluster data centers. We call each group of logical data centers an Availability Zone. Using AWS, customers can leverage 69 Availability Zones across 22 geographic regions worldwide. And, we don’t plan to stop there.
Why does AWS continue to be the leader in cloud? (Also: why do customers choose AWS over other providers?)
Customers are choosing AWS over other providers because it has a lot more functionality, the largest and most vibrant community of customers and partners, the most proven operational and security expertise, and the business is innovating at a faster clip – especially in new areas such as Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, and Serverless Computing
1/AWS has more services, and more features within those services, than any other cloud provider – by a large amount. AWS is also innovating faster than anyone else, and that gap in capability continues to expand. In 2011, we released over 80 new significant services and features, followed by nearly 160 in 2012; 280 in 2013; 516 in 2014; 722 in 2015; 1,017 in 2016; 1,430 in 2017; and 1,957 in 2018. [March 1, 2019]
2/With millions of active customers and tens of thousands of partners globally, AWS has the largest and most dynamic ecosystem. There is a real network effect when you use AWS. Customers across virtually every industry and of every size, including start-ups, enterprises, and public sector organizations, are running every imaginable use case on AWS. And, every AWS customer has the opportunity to benefit from all of the collaboration and feedback AWS gets from customers. And, when you look at AWS’s partner network, it is not just the thousands of systems integrators who built practices around AWS, but most ISVs and SaaS providers will adapt their technology to work on one technology infrastructure platform. Some will do two, very few will have the time to do three. And they all start with AWS, because we have such a significant market segment leadership position.
AWS has unmatched experience, maturity, reliability, security, and performance. Internally, we say that there’s no compression algorithm for experience, and that’s because you can’t learn certain lessons until you get to different milestones in scale. With millions of active customers every month, AWS has many times the usage of other cloud providers who just haven’t learned those lessons yet.
How is AWS different from other technology providers?
Customers have come to really appreciate that the AWS culture is really different. If a startup, enterprise, or government agency is going to partner with an infrastructure provider, it’s typically a long-term decision they’re making, and they really want to understand what’s unique about the culture, or the partner that they are choosing. There are three things that are different about AWS:
1/We’re unusually customer-focused. And a lot of companies say this. Very few walk that walk. Most of the big technology companies are competitor-focused. They look at what the competitors are doing, and they try to one-up the competitors. That can be a very successful strategy, it’s just not ours. 90% of what we build is driven by what customers tell us matters, and the other 10% are things we hear from customers where they may not articulate exactly what they want, but we try to read between the lines and invent on their behalf.
2/We’re pioneers. Most large technology companies have lost their will and DNA to invent. They acquire most of their innovation. And again, it’s a strategy that can work, it’s just not ours. We like to hire builders who look at customer experiences that are flawed, then figure out how to reinvent those. In a space that’s moving as fast as the cloud is, to be partnered with the company that has the most functionality, that’s iterating the quickest, has the largest community, had the vision for cloud from the start without having to patch together acquisitions, that’s very attractive.
3/We’re unusually long-term oriented. You won’t see our folks show up at customers’ doors a day before the end of the quarter or the day before the end of the year and try to harass them into a sale, not to be seen again for a year. We’re trying to build relationships and a business that lasts longer than all of us in this room. And you do that by doing right by customers over a long period of time.
This is why, in part, Intuit named AWS their supplier of their year, and Splunk named us their alliance partner of the year a couple of years in a row now. They’ll tell you we partner in a different way.
An example that ties this all together is a capability in our support function called AWS Trusted Advisor. We’ll look at customers’ utilization of our resources, and if they’re low or idle, we’ll reach out to them and say, maybe you don’t want to spend this money right now. Over the last couple years, we’ve used AWS Trusted Advisor to tell customers how to spend less money with us, leading to hundreds of millions of dollars in savings for our customers every year. And so I ask you, how many technology companies call up their customers and say, stop spending money with us? Not too many.
When we first started doing this, people thought it was a gimmick, but if you understand our culture, it makes perfect sense, because we don’t want to make money from customers unless they’re getting value. We want to reinvent an experience that hasn’t been a very good one for customers over the last several decades, and we’re trying to build a long-term business that outlasts all of us, and you do that by doing right by customers over a long period of time.
Are there any companies that run their entire infrastructure on AWS?
Yes, there are a number of companies that are running – or in the process of moving – their entire infrastructure to AWS. Although most enterprises typically build a two-to-four-year migration plan, if you look at the amount of enterprise migration to AWS, it’s very substantial. Recent customers who have announced going ‘all-in’ on AWS in the past year alone include: Korean Air, Ellie Mae, Pac-12 Conference, Epic Games, Ryanair, Shutterfly, Cox Automotive, GoDaddy, GoGo, Lyft, and Choice Hotels.
Aren’t most companies adopting a multi-cloud approach? (Alt. Question: What is Amazon’s position on multi-cloud strategies?)
When we talk to enterprise or public sector CIOs, most of them start off believing that they’re going to split their workloads in the cloud relatively evenly among two or three providers. But when they get into the practicality and the rigor of assessing it, very few end up going that route. Most predominantly pick one provider. The reasons that they don’t spread it evenly are a few-fold.
1/This forces them to standardize on the lowest common denominator, and these platforms are in widely different spots at this point. AWS just has so much more functionality than anybody else; a much larger, more mature community of service providers, software developers, software solutions, and systems integrators; and a much more mature platform, because we’ve been operating six to seven years longer.
2/Also, it’s a big transition to go from on-premises to the cloud. And if you force teams not only to make that transition, but then on top of it to have to be fluent in multiple cloud platforms, it’s tough. Development teams hate it, and it’s pretty wasteful in terms of resources.
3/Then the third thing is that all these cloud providers have volume discounts, and so if you spread your workloads amongst them, you are losing your ability to get buying power in terms of these volume discounts.
So, the vast majority of customers predominantly pick an infrastructure provider. But, for those that are worried about getting locked in or wanting to make sure if something goes sideways that they have the ability to switch, they will run a small percentage of their workloads with a second provider. This is just so they know they can do it, and they have experience, and they’ve built that relationship – and also for comparison purposes.
Why is AWS growing so fast?
We’re going through a shift in technology that is unlike any other in our lifetime, and it’s happening at a startling pace – much faster than anybody anticipated. The AWS cloud allows companies and organizations to focus on what really differentiates their organizations – such as analyzing petabytes of data, delivering video content, building great mobile apps or even exploring Mars – and leave the heavy lifting of the underlying technology infrastructure to AWS.
Whether it’s regulated data storage for financial services companies such as [FINRA and Intuit], clinical trial simulations with [Bristol Myers-Squibb], financial market big data analytics for the [SEC], streaming movies and original series for [Netflix], or operational support for [NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory] missions, successful customer implementations on AWS are accelerating. Every imaginable business segment is using AWS in a very meaningful way.
How is AWS able to innovate so rapidly?
1/Innovation is in our DNA, and our structure and approach to product development and delivery is fundamentally different than other IT vendors. First, we hire builders. And we think of builders as both people who like to look at customer experiences, figure out the pain points, and reinvent them; and then builders who understand that the launch is the starting line, not the finish line. Anything that we have built that’s ever worked, we didn’t roll it out on day one and have it be an overnight success. You have to keep iterating and listening to customers around what they care about and keep building.
2/We have decentralized, autonomous development teams who are working directly with customers. They are empowered to develop and launch based on what they learn from interactions with customers. We iterate products continuously and the newest and latest is instantly available to customers. No need to upgrade, deploy or migrate. When a feature or enhancement is ready, we “push” it out and it is instantly available to any customer that uses that service.
3/We use the same AWS building blocks and services that our customers do to build our services. Just as for our customers, there’s just no question that we build much faster and can be more agile because we use our own building blocks.
4/This approach also enables us to very rapidly introduce and iterate new services. For example, since 2012 we’ve introduced over 100 major new services which are constantly being enhanced based on customer response, usage and needs. AWS released more than 200 machine learning features and capabilities in 2018.
Is the AWS Cloud secure?
Yes and security will always be our top priority. Examining the AWS cloud, you’ll see that the same security isolations are employed as would be found in a traditional data center. These include physical data center security, separation of the network, isolation of the server hardware, and isolation of storage.
We have a shared responsibility model with the customer; AWS manages and controls the components from the host operating system and virtualization layer down to the physical security of the facilities in which the services operate, and AWS customers are responsible for building secure applications. We provide a wide variety of best practices documents, encryption tools, and other guidance our customers can leverage in delivering application-level security measures. In addition, AWS partners offer hundreds of tools and features to help customers to meet their security objectives, ranging from network security, configuration management, access control, and data encryption.
One of the great things about cloud is that AWS customers inherit all the best practices of AWS policies, architecture, and operational processes built to satisfy the requirements of our most security sensitive customers.
Are AWS features and services reliable?
Yes, the services are very reliable and are one of the main reasons our business has grown as fast as it has. Amazon has spent over a decade building one of the world’s most reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient web infrastructures to run Amazon.com. Still, I can tell you that security and operational performance are our top priorities. We drop everything when we feel like one of these isn’t where it needs to be.
AWS builds its data centers in multiple geographic regions as well as across multiple Availability Zones within each region to offer maximum resiliency against system disruption. AWS designs its data centers with significant excess bandwidth connections so that if a major disruption occurs there is sufficient capacity to enable traffic to be load-balanced to the remaining sites, minimizing the impact on customers.
AWS provides availability SLA’s of 100% for Amazon Route 53, 99.9% for Amazon CloudFront and Amazon S3, 99.95% for Amazon RDS, and 99.99% for Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, and Amazon Fargate for Amazon ECS, and up to 99% for S3 Standard-IA. In addition, we provide a Service Health Dashboard that shows the current operational status of each of our services in real-time, so that our uptime and performance are fully transparent.
What is AWS’s position on sustainability?
AWS is committed to running our business in the most environmentally friendly way possible. Our scale allows us to achieve higher resource utilization and energy efficiency than the typical on-premises data center. In addition to the environmental benefits inherently associated with running applications in the cloud, AWS is committed to achieving 100% renewable energy usage for our global infrastructure. To achieve this goal, we focus on four complementary areas: increasing energy efficiency in our facilities and equipment, continuous innovation in our data centers, advocacy at the global, federal, and state levels to create a favorable environment for renewable energy, and working with various power providers around the world to increase the availability of renewable energy. AWS exceeded 50% renewable energy usage for 2018.
So far this year, AWS has announced four new wind farms and one new solar farm. These projects – two in Ireland, one in Sweden, and two in the United States – will total over 297 megawatts (MW), with expected generation of over 830,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of renewable energy annually. In total, Amazon has enabled 66 renewable energy projects – including 51 solar rooftops – that have the capacity to generate 1,342 MW and deliver more than 3.9 million MWh of energy annually.
To stay up to date on AWS & Sustainability, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/sustainability/. To understand how Amazon is leveraging renewable energy in its facilities along with other sustainability efforts, see: https://www.aboutamazon.com/sustainability.
We’ve seen in the news that Amazon shareholders will vote in May on a proposal to ban the sale of facial recognition technology to governments. How will this impact AWS’s decision to sell to government agencies going forward?
We believe our customers – including law enforcement agencies and other groups working to keep our communities safe – should have access to the best technology. Already we’ve seen Amazon Rekognition used to materially benefit society by helping prevent human trafficking, inhibiting child exploitation, reuniting missing children with their families, and enhancing security through multi-factor authentication.
Over the past several months, we’ve talked to customers, researchers, academics, policymakers, employees, shareholders and others to understand how to best balance the benefits of facial recognition with the potential risks. Based upon those conversations, we shared our proposed guidelines for the responsible use of the technology.
In the two-plus years we’ve been offering Amazon Rekognition, we have not received a single report of misuse by law enforcement. If anyone is concerned that the service is being misused, they can report it here, and we will investigate. Our customers are responsible for following the law in how they use the technology. The AWS Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) prohibits customers from using any AWS service, including Amazon Rekognition, to violate the law, including civil rights laws, and customers who violate our AUP will not be able to use our services.
New technology should not be banned or condemned because of its potential misuse. Instead, there should be open, honest, and earnest dialogue among all parties involved to ensure that the technology is applied appropriately and is continuously enhanced. AWS dedicates significant resources to ensuring our technology is highly accurate and reduces bias, including using training data sets that reflect gender, race, ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity. We’re also committed to educating customers on best practices, and ensuring diverse perspectives in our technology development teams. We will continue to work with partners across industry, government, academia, and community groups on this topic because we strongly believe that facial recognition is an important, even critical, tool for business, government, and law enforcement use.
