Hot Topics Flashcards
What is the status of Amazon’s move off Oracle databases?
We’re virtually done with our company-wide migration:
• As of November 1st 2018, the Amazon team shut off the last Oracle data warehouse and Amazon now runs on Amazon Redshift, which is an AWS service.
• As of the end of 2018, 88% of all databases are off Oracle and running on Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Aurora. This represents 97% of Amazon’s mission critical databases, which is pretty amazing progress.
• As of March 2019, the Amazon Fulfillment teams completed 100% of the migration off Oracle.
Having gone through moving off Oracle databases ourselves, we have a lot of customers interested in learning from our experience. We’re excited to share that experience so customers can get better price performance from their databases.
When companies get to a certain size, does it make sense for them to move off of AWS, like Dropbox?
No. The overwhelming majority of startups that start with AWS stay with AWS as they get bigger. For example, Netflix, Airbnb, SmugMug, Pinterest, Supercell, Lyft, Slack, Domo, Stripe, Adroll, and many others. The AWS Cloud provides such a strong value proposition for companies of all sizes that there really isn’t a customer segment that doesn’t get a lot of benefit from staying and growing on AWS. There are constantly new breakout start-ups that are building a significant part of their businesses on AWS.
Are retailers leaving AWS (e.g. Target) based on noise made by Walmart, others?
Not really. While there are some who are taking a more competitive or inward-facing view versus prioritizing what might give them the most technology capabilities, there are also plenty of examples of retailers using AWS (including Cox Automotive, Brooks Brothers, GoPro, Shop Direct, Shutterfly, Zalando, zulily, and many others). The reason that so many retailers continue to take the long view is that they want to use the technology infrastructure platform that gives them the most functionality, the greatest agility, and the best security and performance. AWS is the clear leader in these areas. Retailers’ end users don’t care about any rivalry that may exist with another retailer. In this fast-moving world, end users care about whether the customer experience is evolving quickly enough to warrant their doing business with that retailer. Speed and capability matter a lot.
What large AWS customers compete with Amazon businesses?
Most of Amazon’s consumer competitors use AWS with Netflix, Nordstrom, and Hulu being prominent examples. The vast majority of Amazon’s retail competitors use AWS. Many we don’t have permission to reference, but those that we do are listed at aws.amazon.com/retail. And there are two reasons why these companies choose AWS: 1/We have a much more capable platform than anybody else, and 2/because they have seen that they are just as important to AWS as Amazon’s consumer businesses, we treat them this way. We, very consciously, want any company, regardless of industry, to be able to use our infrastructure to build and run their business. This is why we’ve been so disciplined and vigilant about making sure that while Amazon’s consumer business is a very important external customer, they’re treated just like an external customer.
How does AWS handle my sensitive data (is it safe to store my sensitive data in AWS if another Amazon business is a competitors)?
First, AWS customer data is never accessed or used by the Amazon retail business. AWS customers have complete control over who can access their data. AWS provides a robust set of tools to ensure that customer data cannot be accessed by anyone without the appropriate permission. AWS is the industry leader in providing its customers with robust security technology and services. AWS is vigilant about its customers’ privacy and data security and has ensured that, since day one, AWS customers have always retained ownership and control of their content along with the ability to encrypt it, protect it, move it, and delete it in alignment with their organization’s security policies. AWS’s extensive security technologies, 24x7 monitoring and alerting, and rigorous attention to all aspects of securing AWS’s infrastructure services are designed to ensure that customers’ data can only be used by them.
For more information and customer case studies in Retail and Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), you can find these on the AWS website: Retail and CPG case studies.
Do critics have a point? Is Amazon getting too big?
No. We’re a small part of the nearly $23 trillion global retail market. There are many successful competitors in every country where we operate and there always will be. In 20 years, there hasn’t been a single day without intense competition. That won’t change. Global retail is going to continue to grow—there’s a ton of green field ahead—and there will continue to be lots of winners.
What are you doing to retain and recruit talent in this highly competitive market?
The most important thing, and it’s true whether there’s competition from other companies or not, is you want to hire people that fit your culture. And for us, that’s builders. We disproportionately index and hire builders. By builders, we mean people who like to invent, people who like to look at different customer experiences and assess what’s wrong with them and reinvent them, and people who get that launch is the starting line, not the finish line.
Anything you want to do that’s going to be successful long-term, you have to listen to what customers tell you is important and keep iterating that. So, you want to hire what fits with your culture, which are builders for us, and then you want to actually make it a place where builders can build. If you look across Amazon, and you look at the amount of building and the amount of inventing, all the customers at the center of that, along with our long-term orientation, it’s a place that builders love to be. There’s no better place to build.
Does the launch of [service name, e.g. Amazon DocumentDB, Amazon QuickSight, Amazon WorkDocs] mean you are now competing with your Consulting Partners and Technology Partners [e.g. MongoDB, Qliq, Tibco, Tableau, Box, Dropbox]?
Most of these technology spaces are so large, and they have so much opportunity, that there isn’t going to be just one winner. There is opportunity for multiple companies to be successful, especially those that are using the cloud to reinvent many of these important areas. When we develop offerings (or move “up the stack”) it’s really driven by customers asking us to have that capability. When customers have asked us for offerings in certain spaces where others already have solutions, almost always our offering is less developed and might not have the same level of functionality. They also might have very different customer experiences because these spaces are very broad. And, if other companies are building businesses where customers are happy with their products and they continue to innovate, they’ll have successful businesses whether AWS has an offering there or not.
For example:
• We launched CloudWatch and New Relic is still flourishing
• We launched EMR, and Cloudera and Hortonworks continue to do well
• We launched CloudWatch Logs, and Splunk continues to thrive
With AWS innovating so quickly, how can customers and partners possibly expect to keep up?
The customers I talk to love our pace of innovation, it’s one of the key reasons they choose AWS over other cloud providers. We do have several training and support offerings for our customers to help them ramp up on new services; ranging from Training and Certifications, Bootcamps, events like the Global Summit Series and re:Invent, to direct interaction with AWS, through a Technical Account Manager, a Solutions Architect, or AWS Professional Services. There are also hundreds of Systems Integrators that can help customers deploy and manage new solutions. While customers appreciate that all new features are automatically available to them – there is no need to download or install new software – they also are not forced into using (and paying for) any specific set of services.
There have been a number of news stories recently about AWS customers having sensitive data exposed because their Amazon S3 buckets were configured to allow public access – why does this keep happening?
Amazon S3 is secure by default. If customers use the default configuration, the bucket locks down access to just the account owner and root administrator. More than a million customers use Amazon S3 safely and securely.
A core tenet of AWS since the very start has been to allow builders the flexibility to change our default configurations to suit whatever style of app they’re constructing. Public websites or publicly downloadable content, for example, requires buckets to be configured with world read access.
As is the case on-premises or anywhere else, when you set a new access control configuration, an application builder needs to ensure that it protects access the way that they intended.
We have a number of services (like AWS CloudTrail to audit access and other operations on AWS resources like Amazon S3 buckets and Amazon Macie, a security service that uses ML to recognize sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII) or intellectual property, and provides dashboards and alerts that give visibility into how this data is being accessed or moved) that help customers audit and consider their configuration changes, and we will continue to add capabilities that give customers additional ways to triple check their customizations.
