It’s 9:30 am on 22nd November and we have a good hour to go before the Mumbai leg of the Amazon Cloud tour begins. Yet the foyer outside the conference rooms is buzzing with activity. It’s already packed with a swarm of backpack clad developers, partners, customers, event management crew, hotel staff, and Amazon executives. The excitement in the air is palpable. Well, that’s the “Force of the Cloud” -- the kind Amazon Web Services (AWS) exudes today. For many, AWS is The Cloud. The hour-long wait passes quickly as I chat up with peers from the industry. The gates are finally thrown open and then there’s a torrent of humans rushing in to pick the best seats in a large hall with six screens. This reminds me of the millions of packets of digital information zipping through the internet’s pipelines, moving to and from Amazon’s Web servers. While everyone is waiting for the main man to arrive (that’s Amazon’s CTO, Dr. Werner Vogels), an Amazon executive takes the stage and conducts an impromptu quiz on Amazon’s achievements and milestones. Books are given away to those who answer correctly.

Speaking of achievements, AWS was launched in 2006, but initially catered to start-ups and highly innovative companies. The online retail site Amazon.com (from where you buy books and other merchandise) had its own infrastructure and moved to the AWS platform much later. Incidentally, Amazon has three distinct lines of business today: Retail (online store), Seller (partners selling goods) and Web Services (for enterprises). AWS also helps retailers set up their own storefronts, prominent examples being Mothercare and Marks & Spencer. With customers in 190 countries AWS has an impressive roster of (Fortune 100) customers that include NASDAQ, Virgin Atlantic, NY Times, and others. Even partners like SAP are customers for AWS. SAP has developed an application called SAP Carbon Impact on demand that runs on the AWS platform, as a service. Companies like Rediff, NDTV, TataSky and Hungama are early adopters of Amazon Web Services in India.

To serve these high transaction, data-intensive businesses, Amazon needed technology that could scale massively. In the absence of this technology (or suitable solutions) it decided to build its own platforms and services. In fact, Amazon engineers are regarded as experts in scaling technology. But the folks at AWS could see that other businesses were struggling with scalability, which it regards as a hindrance to innovation. So it decided to help these companies and offer its hosting platform and numerous services – the most popular ones being EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) for virtual servers) and S3 (Simple Storage Service) for Web based storage.

Many of these businesses operate with minimal infrastructure, preferring to host everything on the cloud – on Amazon’s Web servers. One customer who gave a testimonial at the event said it operates with only two or three laptops, “preferring to push all its data to the cloud”. Envious of the benefits that these start-ups enjoy, large enterprises (Fortune 100) are hopping on to Amazon’s cloud; this is perhaps regarded as the fastest route to the cloud. And Amazon is glad to help through a business model that focuses on high volumes and low-margins. As a company, Amazon wants to be the Earth's most customer-centric company, where people all over the world can find and discover virtually anything they want to buy online. And this vision is true for AWS too. Customers request a service and AWS engineers get to work writing code or tweaking a service.

Dr Werner Vogels finally arrives and jogs up to the main stage. He is perspiring profusely, but it’s not the Mumbai heat that’s getting to him; blame it on the heat from the intense spotlights on stage.

Our innovative products like Amazon S3 and EC2 help people remove barriers of scale and cost. The mission for AWS is to enable businesses and developers to use Web services to build scalable, sophisticated applications

Dr Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon

“When we started this business we focused on innovation and launched innovative products like Amazon S3 and EC2. In doing so we could help people remove barriers of scale and cost. The mission for AWS is to enable businesses and developers to use Web services to build scalable, sophisticated applications. Enterprises tells us that the biggest advantage they get on the cloud is agility,” said Dr. Vogels.

REGIONS & ZONES

When businesses have such a high dependence on Amazon’s infrastructure, outages and downtime are the last thing that anyone wants. Yes, there have been Amazon outages in April and August this year. AWS has responded with resilient architecture that includes ‘regions’ (countries/states with AWS datacenters) and ‘availability zones’ (redundant data centers). For instance, one region is the US East Region (North Virginia) which has three availability zones in different parts of the state. Data is automatically synchronized between the availability zones. So when one zone goes down (due to a natural calamity) the services can be re-provisioned from another zone -- and business continues. In this manner AWS has set up multiple levels of disaster recovery.

Other regions are the US West, the EU and APAC (Singapore and Tokyo). The nearest Amazon data center (Region) for Indian customers is Singapore. AWS plans to increase the number of countries with data centers (Regions) in 2012. Dr. Vogels informed us that it could set up one in India, provided there was “enough demand here.”