Richard Harshman, Amazon Web Services head of Asean, says most businesses adopt Cloud computing simply because of the speed and agility.
“Let me just say that Amazon Web Services is not just using excess capacity from Amazon,” said Richard Harshman, Amazon Web Services head of Asean.
Harshman’s quip is a semi-serious answer to a common question often asked by journalists when discussing Amazon web Services (AWS).
“We’re in fact a separate business unit within Amazon,” he said.
In fact, Amazon Web Services rose out of the online retail giant’s voracious appetite for data centres and related services for its own online retail business, where Amazon found that after 10 years of operating on such a large scale, it had gained enough experience to start offering the same services to other developers and businesses.
Cloud services as a business is an ever-growing market, as more and more businesses opt to move some or all of their services online.
Since its launch in 2006, AWS now counts amongst its customers many international and local corporations such as Netflix, Spotify, Foursquare, Unilever, MyTeksi, AmInvest (AmBank Group’s fund management business), Astro Radio (Astro’s online radio streaming service) who run either wholly or partly on the services that AWS offers.
Many of these businesses, Harshman adds, chose to adopt Cloud computing simply because of the speed and agility – with AWS doing the heavy lifting of adding servers to increase capacity, handling the cooling and all the other nitty-gritty of running a data centre – businesses can instead concentrate on delivering services to their customers in a timely manner instead of spending time upgrading their infrastructure to support it.
According to Harshman, the main advantage of AWS, apart from benefiting from Amazon’s wealth of experience, is that AWS requires no upfront capital expense or long term contracts.
For example, AmInvest which runs analytical and statistical modelling for its funds management service on AWS, has lowered the cost of running analytics by 50% over a five-year period and reduced the average time to complete client scenarios in half.
AWS runs some 11 data centre locations around the world, including centres in the United States, Brazil, Japan, Singapore, China, Australia and Germany.
These “AWS Regions” as the company calls it, each have at least two or more “Availability Zones”, which are clusters of multiple data centres in separate locations which are engineered to be operationally independent of the other Availability Zones.
Harshman adds that one of the advantages of AWS over its competitors is that the company is constantly lowering the prices on is services – Amazon has lowered the prices of AWS services some 48 times since it started.
While AWS has long had a lead in the cloud services business, it faces a highly competitive market made up of such big names as IBM, Google and Microsoft, which all have substantial stakes in the Cloud services business.
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