Hot Topics Flashcards
Q: Can you comment on Google’s claims that [Netflix, Airbnb… any big customers of AWS we know are still totally committed to AWS] are using GCE?
I encourage you to look deeper into claims like these or talk to the customer(s) yourself. What you’ll find are more creative exaggerations by a competitor than reality. Airbnb and Netflix run almost entirely on AWS. They may run tests on other platforms or a small, occasional, one-off workload, but that doesn’t mean they are running anything meaningful.
Q: In your most recent earnings, you stated that AWS usage has grown close to 90% y/y, yet now you’ve reported that S3 usage has grown 102% and EC2 usage has grown 93% - can you explain the difference in these figures?
The “close to 90% y/y growth” mentioned in our Q4 2014 earnings call is a blended number based on revenue across all our services. The numbers mentioned today are based on a single service and represent a specific type of usage growth for each service by active customers.
Q: How long can the company continue to invest in a capital-intensive business like AWS? Or Can Amazon continue to afford AWS?
The company is well positioned to continue to invest aggressively in AWS. It continues to grow at a dramatic rate, close to 90% year-over-year in Q4 ’14 on a very large base, and is a successful business. We have a high level of confidence that it will generate significant free-cash flow and returns on invested capital over time.
Q: Does the launch of Amazon [service name, e.g., Zocalo] mean you are now competing with your customers/partners [e.g., Box and Dropbox]?
In every area of software services, there’s huge opportunity for multiple companies to be successful, especially those that are using the cloud to reinvent many of these important solutions. We’re excited about being the infrastructure underneath many of our partners who are redefining this space. Also, if pushed further, remind people that:It sounds juicy and interesting to talk about this tension, but the reality is that these market segments are very large, not winner-take-all, and have (and will continue to have) multiple successful companies. When AWS built a service with monitoring capabilities, companies like New Relic continued to flourish. Heroku continues to do well with Elastic Beanstalk in the market. MongoDB is still growing very fast with DynamoDB around. These are very large spaces with the cloud offering the opportunity to shake up and redefine the landscapes of all of these areas. The teams and businesses that build remarkable products and services in these areas will have amazing opportunities to build successful, lasting companies—and we’ll be right there to support them with our infrastructure platform.
Q: How is AWS involved in the DDoS attacks of Code Spaces and Websolr/Bonsai?
The current problems with the companies mentioned in the press earlier this year are not related to any AWS service issue. Our services are operating as designed. Customers who have questions about security best practices can find information at our Security Resources page (http://aws.amazon.com/security/security-resources/).
Q: I read that Greenpeace ranked AWS as an “F” for running Green data centers. Does AWS care about the environment?
Greenpeace’s data is incorrect. We’ve told them it is and they continue to ignore the facts and irresponsibly publicize it. AWS has been and continues to be committed to working hard on our own, and together with our power providers all over the world, to offer AWS Cloud services in an environmentally friendly way in all of our Regions. AWS has a long-term commitment to achieve 100% renewable energy usage for our global infrastructure footprint. AWS introduced its first carbon-neutral region – US West (Oregon) – in 2011. Since then, the US West (Oregon) Region is one of our largest and fastest growing AWS Regions. Today, AWS offers customers three AWS Regions that are 100% carbon-neutral – US West (Oregon), EU (Frankfurt), and AWS GovCloud (US). Cloud computing is inherently more environmentally friendly than traditional computing. Today, individual companies often operate one or many corporate datacenters to meet their internal IT requirements. Even with broad adoption of virtualization technology, most enterprises still struggle to achieve high utilization rates for their data center infrastructure. The result is a significant amount of unused server capacity and wasted energy consumption to power all of this unused or underutilized infrastructure. AWS operates at a massive scale and has invested in significant hardware, software, and operational efficiencies that drive more than a 3X improvement in server utilization levels as compared to the average corporate datacenter. AWS Infrastructure uses rack-optimized systems that use up to 8-times less energy than the blade server enclosures that are often used in corporate datacenters. Because the AWS Cloud pools resources, customers who deploy applications in the cloud can reduce their carbon footprint by default and significantly reduce the amount of environmental waste that occurs when individual datacenters don’t operate near their capacity. See our new environmental page at http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/sustainable-energy/.
Q: What is Amazon’s stance on Net Neutrality?
Amazon welcomes President Obama’s call for strong net neutrality protections throughout the network, no matter the technology. We have long believed that consumers should not be denied highest quality access to the content of their choice because of discriminatory deals cut by their broadband Internet access provider. We look forward to working with the FCC to adopt a strong non-discrimination rule to protect the open Internet.
Q: What are you doing to prevent customers being victims of fraud by exposing their credentials on public sites like GitHub?
We take security very seriously at AWS, and we provide many resources, guidelines and mechanisms to help customers configure AWS services and develop applications using security best practices. Our documentation for managing AWS access keys stresses that customers should remove their root access key (or better yet, not generate one at all) from their AWS account, use AWS Identity Access Management (IAM) to create temporary security credentials for applications that interact with AWS resources, and then carefully manage those IAM access keys. However, developers are responsible for following our guidance and utilizing those mechanisms. When we become aware of potentially exposed credentials, we proactively notify the affected customers and provide guidance on how to secure their access keys. Our security resource center includes extensive resources, http://aws.amazon.com/security/security-resources/, and more instructions on access key management can be found here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws-access-keys-best-practices.html.
Q: What are your thoughts on standards?
Ideas on openness and standards have been talked about for years in web services. And, we do believe standards will continue to evolve in the cloud computing space. But, what we’ve heard from customers thus far, customers who are really committed to using the cloud, is that the best way to illustrate openness and customer flexibility is by what you actually provide and deliver for them. Since 2006, we’ve made AWS available via multiple platforms, multiple programming languages and multiple operating systems – because that’s what customers have told us matters the most to them. We’ll continue to pursue an approach of providing customers with maximum flexibility as the standards discussion unfolds. In any event, we do believe that standards will continue to evolve and that establishing the right ones, based on a better understanding of what is needed, will best serve customers.
Q: What is AWS’s strategy around open source? Is it a potential disruptor to your business model?
We view open source as a companion to AWS’s business model. We use open source and have built most AWS services on top of open source technology, like MySQL. We also contribute to open source. We think it’s really important to the development community and don’t believe it’s going to stop anytime soon. AWS customers want to run services on top of those open protocols in part because it allows the freedom to move workloads around. They don’t want to feel locked into any one place. As we see customers asking for services based on various open source technologies, we’ll keep adding those services. At AWS, we love innovation so we are continuously iterating. As customers tell us they want to build services around various pieces of technology or open source, we’ll do it.
Q: What about your SLA’s? Are they really enterprise-class?
Many of the SLA’s you see out there are written in a way that either defines out a lot of downtime (calling that downtime maintenance) or are written so a vendor never has to pay out. AWS is totally clear about how our SLA’s are calculated. More importantly though, what matters most is demonstrated performance, and ours has been strong. We’re transparent about that and have a service health dashboard that anyone can see at any time.
Q: Isn’t it easy for hackers to use EC2 to attack others?
No. It’s important to understand that a person with mal-intent can find a server from anywhere – whether it’s in the cloud or not. AWS also has a dedicated team of engineers and investigators who build algorithms and mechanisms to proactively detect and prevent misuse of our services. We also respond quickly if customers bring suspected misuse to our attention.
Q: How does Amazon Kindle use AWS?
There are several features of Kindle that take advantage of AWS, including: free backup and storage for all of the Amazon content purchased; Whispersync across voice, books and movies; Second Screen – the ability to fling a movie or TV show to your large screen and still use your tablet for multiple functions; Silk browser; and Amazon Mayday. Also, the Amazon Fire TV and Fire Phone leverage AWS for backup, storage, and streaming services while the brain for the new Amazon Echo automated assistant device is in AWS so that it will continue to develop, get smarter, and add more functionality over time.
Q: What did you think about Brad Stone’s book on Amazon?
I’ve never read it. (This is the answer for all spokespeople other than Andy)
Q: Is the AWS Cloud reliable? Can it be used for mission critical business applications?
Yes, as evidenced by the large number of startups, enterprises, and government organizations that are running mission critical applications on AWS – including large web sites, e-commerce applications, SAP deployments, scientific analysis, and financial services risk simulations. Overall, customers have told us that AWS has provided them with strong operational performance over many years – and in many cases higher uptime than they achieved in their own datacenters with the same applications. Amazon has spent over a decade building one of the world’s most reliable, secure, scalable, and cost-efficient web infrastructures to run Amazon.com and we bring that experience with us to AWS. Our operational performance has been quite strong since 2006 and is one of the key reasons we’ve grown as quickly as we have. Still, we remain focused and driven to remove any and all causes of failure. Our goal remains to make our operational performance indistinguishable from perfect, so we drop everything when we feel like it isn’t where it needs to be. AWS provides availability SLA’s of up to 99.95% on services such as Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS, and up to 99.9% for Amazon S3. In addition, we provide a Service Health Dashboard that shows the current operational status of each of our services in real-time, so that our uptime and performance are fully transparent.
