Miscellaneous Flashcards
Tell me more about the AWS Marketplace.
AWS Marketplace is a managed and curated software catalog with an ecommerce storefront, that helps customers innovate faster and reduce costs, by making it easy to find, buy, and immediately deploy and manage 3rd party software. Customers can quickly deploy pre-configured software solutions in a number of deployment modes such as AMIs, SaaS, and Desktop software. Customers pay for only what they use, on their AWS bill. AWS Marketplace features over 39 software categories including Security, Networking, BI, Storage, Databases, Operating Systems, and Business Software. Our selection grows monthly and is in excess of 4,800 listings from over 1,400 sellers.
How are enterprises using AWS?
Really, enterprises across every business segment are using AWS in a meaningful way.
• In financial services: Capital One, Intuit, HSBC, Barclays
• In healthcare, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Pfizer, Novartis, Bristol Myers Squibb
• In oil & gas, Shell, BP, Hess, Haliburton
• In manufacturing, GE, Philips, Schneider Electric, Siemens
• In travel and hospitality, Expedia, Singapore Air, Korean Air, Hilton Hotels
• In media, Netflix, HBO, Turner, Disney, and Twenty-First Century Fox.
How does innovation allow you to drive costs down?
While most customers are aware of our accelerating pace of innovation in the many new services and features we launch every week, innovation also permeates every aspect of AWS operations. Behind the scenes, we are continuously enhancing reliability, performance, and efficiency of our operations through extensive use of custom-designed data center architectures, networking, and equipment.
Additionally, we are actively innovating maintenance and management activities by increasing the software automation we use to help run our services. This innovation helps to make our staff more productive and equipment to more easily scale, further driving down the costs of operating our business.
There is a lot of concern around security and privacy of customer data. If AWS gets a request to hand over data, what will you do? Alt version of the question: I know that the CIA and NSA are AWS customers, do they have access to all of your customer’s data?
Amazon and AWS are vigilant about our customers’ privacy and have implemented sophisticated technical and physical measures to prevent unauthorized access. We have a world-class team of security experts monitoring our systems 24/7 to protect customer content. We will not disclose customer content in response to requests unless required to do so to comply with a legally valid and binding order, such as a subpoena or a court order. Additionally, when possible we would notify the customer before disclosing their content so they could seek protection from disclosure. It’s also important to point out that customers can choose to encrypt their content as part of a standard security process for highly sensitive content. AWS provides tools customers can use to encrypt their data at rest or in motion, or customers can choose from a number of supported 3rd party security solutions. Content that has been encrypted is rendered useless without the applicable decryption keys.
Once Data is stored in AWS, who owns it?
AWS customers retain ownership and control of their content.
What is AWS’ stance on privacy?
Regardless of where a request for customer content comes from, we are vigilant about our customers’ privacy and have implemented sophisticated technical and physical measures to prevent unauthorized access. We have a world-class team of security experts monitoring our systems 24/7 to protect customer content. We will not disclose customer content in response to requests unless required to do so to comply with a legally valid and binding order, such as a subpoena or a court order. Additionally, we would notify the customer before disclosing their content so they could seek protection from disclosure, unless prohibited by law. It’s also important to point out that customers can choose to encrypt their content as part of a standard security process for highly sensitive content. AWS provides tools customers can use to encrypt their data at rest or in motion, or customers can choose from a number of supported 3rd party security solutions. Content that has been encrypted is rendered useless without the applicable decryption keys.
- What does AWS do to prevent misuse of AWS services?
AWS employs a number of mitigation techniques, both manual and automated, to prevent the misuse of the services. We have automatic systems in place that detect and block many attacks before they leave our infrastructure. Our terms of usage are clear and when we find misuse we take action quickly and shut it down.
Illegal activities across the Internet have been commonplace long before the cloud. Abusers who choose to run their software in an environment like Amazon EC2 make it easier for us to disable their software. This is a significant improvement over the Internet as a whole where abusive hosts can often be inaccessible and run unabated for long periods of time. Additionally, users of Amazon EC2 use the same precautions to secure and protect their websites as they would with traditional hosting solutions. It is no easier for would-be abusers to compromise EC2 based websites than other publicly available websites. We encourage anyone who thinks they see misuse of the service to email
Is the AWS Cloud reliable enough for mission critical business applications?
Yes, as evidenced by the large number of startups, enterprises, and government organizations that are running mission critical applications on AWS – including large web sites, e-commerce applications, SAP deployments, scientific analysis, and financial services risk simulations. Overall, customers have told us that AWS has provided them with strong operational performance over many years – and in many cases higher uptime than they achieved in their own data centers with the same applications.
Amazon has spent over a decade building one of the world’s most reliable, secure, scalable, and cost-efficient web infrastructures to run Amazon.com and we bring that experience with us to AWS. Our operational performance has been quite strong since 2006 and is one of the key reasons we’ve grown as quickly as we have. Still, we remain focused and driven to remove any and all causes of failure. Our goal remains to make our operational performance indistinguishable from perfect, so we drop everything when we feel like it isn’t where it needs to be.
How does AWS’s reliability compare with competitors?
We believe we have meaningfully stronger operational performance than other providers. We have more than a decade of experience, and we have a much larger volume of usage. As Gartner noted in their IaaS Magic Quadrant AWS has the largest share of compute capacity in use by paying customers – many times the aggregate size of all other cloud providers in the market segment. So, when you have a lot more usage volume, you have a lot more opportunity for issues. And our performance over the last eleven years has been strong. It’s a maturity thing. If you look at some of the issues other providers had this year, you would see global service disruptions that lasted for days.
Should customers be running multi-Region (vs. multi-AZ) if they want the highest availability?
Each of our regions is architected with multiple availability zones to protect data durability and service availability. They’re even architected to be able to withstand the loss of physical infrastructure. This has allowed our regional services like DynamoDB and S3 to achieve high availability. That said, there things you can do to architect for higher and higher availability.
What are your plans for global expansion?
The AWS global infrastructure is comprised of 69 Availability Zones within 22 geographic Regions with announced plans for nine more Availability Zones and three more Regions in Indonesia, Italy, and South Africa. There’s a very, very large opportunity for cloud computing internationally and you can expect that we’ll continue to add Regions.
Where have you announced new AWS Regions?
I can confirm that we will have three more Regions in Indonesia, Italy, and South Africa before the first half of 2020. I have no additional details to share at this time.
When are you going to open a region in [country]?
We’re constantly getting feedback from customers on where they would like the next AWS Region and have a long list of target countries [and U.S. locations] that we are looking at. We’re always re-evaluating and reprioritizing that list and [Country/U.S. location] is just one of the many possibilities that we are currently looking at. In the fullness of time you can expect AWS Regions in multiple major countries and U.S. locations around the world.
How do you choose your next Region?
Where we locate our Regions is based on a combination of factors. We consider locations in terms of how much geographic area we can cover, to give customers low latency when running applications, the availability of renewable energy, and the local government’s long-term commitment to investing in technology infrastructure.
We also look at countries with data sovereignty preferences where, for whatever reason, customers are less likely to consume services when the infrastructure is not operated from within their country, such as Germany.
There are a number of other factors we consider, but if you look at the size of the area that we touch in our business including, infrastructure software, hardware, and data center services, these are trillions of dollars worldwide, both short and long term. And if you look at the amount of computing that’s being done in each major country of the world, it probably warrants having multiple Regions not just in the U.S., but in Europe, and in other Asian and Latin American countries. We’re far from being done adding Regions.
How much will AWS – and the market – move beyond infrastructure to higher-level services like PaaS?
From a services and feature perspective, we are seeing a growing demand in areas like Application Services and Analytics. For example, we are seeing very strong demand for WorkSpaces, our new Desktop as a Service Solution, in the Application Services space. We are also seeing increasing demand in the Analytics space for services like Kinesis, which is our real-time analytics service that can be used to generate and process data coming from the internet of things (IoT). And, we introduced WorkDocs, our fully managed, secure enterprise storage and sharing service that improves user productivity. Each of these solutions were built to solve a customer need. So, as we look to the future, you will continue to see us invest in areas, like these, where there is a large customer need.
