Mr Andy Jassy: If you are a startup, you should move everything to the cloud. It makes no sense to build on an old world model.

While Amazon.com is renowned for its revolutionary online bookstore which has since evolved into a comprehensive e-commerce platform for hundreds of thousands of brands and sellers, it expects its cloud computing services to be the next big thing.

Leveraging over a decade of experience in building and running scalable web applications, Amazon.com has embarked on a broader mission of serving a new customer segment – developers and businesses – with a platform of web services that can be used to build sophisticated, scalable applications. As a result, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was formed, and the company began offering customers access to cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon’s own back-end technology.

Delivering a keynote address at the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore’s Distinguished Infocomm Speaker series on 29 April 2010, Mr Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President of AWS, spoke about Amazon’s cloud computing business and the company’s vision for the future.

How did Amazon get into cloud computing?
We had been working on this business for about 10 years without realising it. To scale Amazon.com, which is a massive application, we had to get really good deep into the stack running infrastructure services like storage, computing, databases, and messaging, and things like that. So, we built a competency in running scalable infrastructure services and data centres.

Also, around 2002-2003, Amazon was growing very quickly and hiring a lot of software engineers, but it was taking a lot longer to get software projects done than we thought it should. We discovered everyone was doing the same thing in different departments, and no one was building solutions that extend beyond their particular project. They were all reinventing the wheel without adding any value. That was very enlightening for Amazon and we realised there was internal demand for scalable and reliable cost-effective services.

What are the key benefits of cloud computing?
One of the top benefits of the cloud is that companies don’t have to spend on capital expense and data centres. They get to turn that into variable expense which is a big advantage for those who don’t have a lot of capital. You only have to pay for what you use, and you don’t have to sit on excess capacity and upfront fees. That makes it truly elastic up and down, allowing your company to grow as fast as it needs to, and then when it doesn’t need capacity to shed it and not sit on that waste.

Using the cloud also allows you to move much more quickly, you can spin off thousands of instances in minutes instead of waiting a long time for the server, over provisioning wasted capacity or having to worry that the amount of capacity you forecasted was insufficient to keep pace with your growth.

Lastly, it allows you to take scarce manpower resources and instead of applying them to running infrastructure, let them spend time on things that truly differentiate your company.

Are there things you shouldn’t move to the cloud?
If you are a startup, you should move everything to the cloud. It makes no sense to build on an old world model. If you’re an enterprise that has a new development, it is also a no brainer to build on top of the cloud. If you’re an enterprise that has been around for a while and has lots of legacy application software, it is not so easy, and it is ill-advised to move everything at once.

We find that most enterprises are moving more methodically and taking a diverse set of applications to try on the cloud for a few weeks or months. Usually, they get excited and they try to figure out how to peel off more applications onto our cloud, and there is usually a 12- to 36-month migration plan.

What is Amazon doing in Singapore and why?
AWS has had availability zones in United States and Europe. One of the most frequent requests over the past two years has been to open an Asia-Pacific region, and we are doing that in Singapore today.

There are several reasons why we chose Singapore even though we looked at every country in the Asia-Pacific region very carefully. We wanted a country with strong connectivity and proximity to a lot of different locales in the region. We looked at the quality of the infrastructure and connectivity, and the talent and people there as we are building a presence here for a long time, and we want to build a big business here.

It was very important to have strong talent, and then we looked at how easy it was and how collaborative the people of the country, the government, and the technology organisations were, and Singapore shines in every single one of these categories.