Werner Vogel just finished his “Ahead in the Cloud” talk here at the DISC 08 workshop. As always, very entertaining. Amazon is light years ahead of the rest of the industry in thinking about and delivering utility computing to the world.

The talk was not technical given the audience here but here are some highlights/notes (subjective of course):

• Werner introduced himself as “a systems administrator for a small bookshop in Seattle” 🙂
• Animoto story (always great hearing about this success story)
• It appears that Amazon has the capacity to deal with MANY Animoto scenarios at the same time, if a situation arises
• Apparently startups are not the only significant load for Amazon‘s services
• 20 billion objects in S3 and increasing exponentially
• Utility computing in the cloud: moves CAPEX to OPEX
• A very interesting point about utilization… if we make it cheap/easy to acquire resources (e.g. provision a server), engineers will not think twice releasing them when they don’t need them anymore hence improving utilization of the infrastructure.
• “Software as a service”: Hmmm… I think I am starting to dislike this term. Werner used it. They are not delivering software but “functionality”. Salesforce, for example, hosts the functionality for our behalf. It’s “functionality as a service” or just “service”. Anyway… just terminology I guess.