Internetdagarna Day 2, Matt Wood

Following the keynote on day 2 of Internetdagarna was Dr. Matt Wood from Amazon. Matt Wood is a platform evangelist, working on the Amazon Web Services (AWS).

It did not take long from Matt Wood had started until twitter went crazy. People did not consider Matt’s talk a keynote, but merely a sales pitch. My take on this was somewhat divided, yes the talk was a sales pitch and as a keynote it failed, but at the same time the topic had a lot of professional interest to me.

I have decided to go over my notes here anyway even though I think Amazon did not understand the assignment of delivering a visionary keynote on cloud computing at an Internet conference, instead they did an 2.99 sales pitch, without capturing the majority of the audience.

Well disappointment aside and once more onto the pitch.

Matt stated that Amazon is a tech company, that happen to run a book store. All of their experience and expertise in running an international web based bookstore has been invested into their web service solutions.

AWS started by offering programmatic developer access (an API) to their commerce platform for accessing metadata.

In addition Amazon now offers a scalable infrastructure cloud solution named EC2 and a storage solution S3.

Matt focused on the EC2 part and the functional offering instead of the data and storage based offerings.

Matt presented an intriguing view on what problem it is that cloud computing solves. In traditional IT projects and software development it is the handling of infrastructure that inflicts the friction. The postulate by Amazon is that the infrastructure handling, they refer to this is heavy lifting is 70% and 30% is the actual development and where actual business values is added. The pitch from Amazon it that they want to maximize this.

Matt also stated that the cloud drives innovation, making the transition from idea to product easier and providing start-ups with essential leverage, so investment can be kept to an absolute minimum.

EC2 has a very low barrier for entry:

- it is access on-demand

- low-cost, where you pay as you go

- utility computing and utility infrastructure

- flexibility, lots of flexibility

An example was Animoto

Lots of issues remain. Matt Wood mentioned the shared responsibility model, which is used by Amazon to found a mutual responsibility for security aspects. Amazon have published two whitepapers on the topic. In regard to regulation Matt emphasized that in the AWS cloud data is local, data is not mirrored to US from Europe example.

I will hopefully write about cloud computing in the future since I am evaluating and experimenting with a micro cloud solution supporting Perl.