Why You Can't Ignore Amazon's Cloud

I really enjoyed the inaugural AWS Summit in New Zealand back in May.  It was well worth the trip to Auckland - if you missed it you can find the slides here.

Since the event my passion, for cloud generally and Amazon specifically, has grown exponentially.

As I have continued to explore just how true elastic computing can help, the arguments in favour have become more and more compelling.

I was well aware that AWS had a strong price reduction proposition.  What I hadn't realized was how much a philosophy and commitment to price reduction underpins their approach.  If you read through the AWS Economics Centre material you will see they have reduced the price to their customers 31 times since 2007.  That is almost 5 times a year, nearly every 60 days.

@Werner, Amazon CTO, presenting in Auckland in May '13.

The case studies from AWS customers continue to be enlightening and compelling.  The fact that Outsmart Studios has more than 25 million users playing their online game is quite revealing.  A small New Zealand company was able to leverage the power of Amazon's elasticity to only pay for the computing resources they use.  As usage escalated during peak times, the computing power automatically scaled to meet demand.   

I have also been heartened to hear and see many local government and central government organisations begin to explore how they can leverage Amazon's cloud.  Many have realised that they cannot come close to matching the security provided by AWS, and the issue of data sovereignty is an issue of data classification inside the enterprise, not security in an AWS data centre.

Government organisations that classify their data can find many use cases where AWS is the best option for hosting their systems.  As I said in a previous post anything you publish on the web is already 'out there', and could (I would argue should) be served from a public cloud provider.  You cannot beat them for price, service, availability or scalability.

Here's my stake in the ground.  Circa 50% of all business applications will be hosted, managed and supported by a public cloud provider before 2018.  That's 30+ years of history moved to a new paradigm in 5 years. Exciting times!

Cheers!