Yesterday evening I went along to Strathclyde University for a talk on Amazon’s new web services given by Jeff Barr a senior evangelist for Amazon Web Services. When you mention the word Amazon to people, most will either think of The Amazon Jungle or the hugely successful online book supplier. Myself included won’t realise that Amazon, the book supplier, is quietly making waves that might have massive impact on the way businesses large and small, manager their IT business systems. This something that I’ve coin as "Hardware-less Computer Systems". Jeff also talked about other services such as Amazon E-commerce, Amazon Historical Pricing, Alexa and Mechanical Turk.
Hardware-less Computer Systems
Obviously Amazon’s S3, SQS and EC2 services do run on physical hardware, but as end users of the services you don’t need to care about how hardware is managed, how well it might scale, where its located or backup and redundancy. You store your data and thousands can retrieve it, send it your raw data and your software systems output it as value added information. Interconnect your independent business systems together using Amazon SQS. Think of it as mega computer that can grow from the power of single desktop home computer to that of a super computers in seconds. A computer system that has infinite amount of processing and data storage.
Modular System
You may heard of SaaS (Software as a Service) which is a term for applications that run as a remote service typically via a web browser, rather than a local installed application. Amazon infrastructure services could be considered as HaaS, Hardware as a Service. The complete system consists of three modular services that can be combined or used separately…
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) – Storage
Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) – Interconnection/buffering
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) – Processing Power
Pricing Model
You might be thinking big deal, it sounds expensive. And you would be right to think that, such systems are normally reserved for large enterprises. Although, by applying economics of scale and charging by the hour and the gigabyte, Amazon has a very competitive pricing model. This model means that smaller businesses can have access to powerful computer systems normally reserved for multinationals.
Applying Amazon S3 services
Imagine one month you need to store 200 GB worth of data storage offsite from your office and the next 11 months you only need 2 GB of storage. With a traditional hosting company this will likely cost you in excess of £300. Store your data with Amazon S3 and the first month might cost you £30 and the following months would be £4. A similar scenario could be applied to a business who requires large amounts of processing power for a couple of hours a month. Normally the business would have to purchase several machines to achieve this.
People Power
Another exciting service Jeff talked about was Amazon’s Mechanical Turk which allows people to hire other people to perform various tasks that can’t be achieve using computers. For example I could place the text of this blog on Turk and say I would pay some one $3 to translated this into Spanish. Maybe I’ve taken a 2,000 photo’s of people doing a sponsor run and want to tag each photo with their running number, I can summit this job to Turk. The model is similar to eBay, where providers (sellers) of the work are rated and the workers (buyers) are rated on their output.
E-Commerce, Historical Pricing and Alexa
Jeff also spoke about Amazon E-Commerce Service which allows people to build their own online shop using Amazon’s catalogue and payment system. Imagine supermarkets offering corner shops access to their extensive catalogue and aggressive pricing model. Amazon Historical Pricing service gives users access to over three years of actual sales data for Amazon products which you can combine with the E-commerce Service. Alexa which is Amazon’s Search as a Service offers vast repository information about internet traffic and structure of the web which can be hardness in a number of manners.
Couple of interesting sites that use these services are…
– Turk example
http://www.thesheepmarket.com/- http://www.gigavox.com/
- http://weoceo.weogeo.com/
- https://www.cruxy.com/
- http://www.pownce.com – S3
I really enjoyed Jeff’s presentation, you could tell he was a bit an old dog when it came to balancing live demo’s with an enthusiastic audience which constantly kept asking questions. My only disappoint is that Amazon currently doesn’t have any data centre’s in the UK or Europe. From a business point of view I know many UK clients this might be an issues.
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