GoCloudy Blog

This week I attended Cloud for the Enterprise Event event held by Amazon in Los Angeles, CA.

Having gathered around 50 ITPros and execs the event was purposed to show enterprise readiness of Amazon IaS cloud services collectively called AWS. Amazon CTO Dr. Werner Vogels together with a band of product evangelists and lineup of AWS customers did a series of presentations which explained why Amazon is ready to accomodate enterprises:

• Werner Vogels elaborated how recently introduced EC2 spot instances helped Amazon achieve one of the highest in the industry rates of server utilization which won’t blow out  your hosted services when “the Christmas day comes”.
• Jerry Hunter, VP of Amazon Corporate IT, revealed that the company was undergoing a massive migration of all of its business critical IT services to the AWS infrastructure
• Recently hired security super star Steve Riley brought even more confidence in AWS by telling how serious Amazon treats security of its services on all levels starting from access control to physical data centers and going all the way up to network segments isolation and VPC.
• Customer representatives from different industries and verticals shared successful case studies of applying AWS to a variety of high demand and long durability business workloads including media distribution at MGM, image recognition by NASA JPL, multimedia content publishing at VMIX and even patient data exchange by Nimbus Health.

The common motto that I’m sure stayed in everybody’s head after the event was that Amazon IaS cloud has proven to be scalable, secure and cost efficient platform that will continue to revolutionize the way enterprises do IT today. Although it was hard to persuade myself that the world in its entirety is ready to embrace this new age of computing now I tend to believe that we’re gradually getting to this new order.

Here are a couple of inspiring quotes that I captured from the speakers:

Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO: “We’ve been innovating so fast that customers asked us to hold off”

Steve Riley, Amazon security evangelist: “Can you imagine that one day you’ll wake up in the world without central IT where the only thing that you plug in the office is a Cisco router?”

Jinesh Varia, Amazon technology evangelist, “Design for failures and nothing will fail”