Quality Alchemist (品質煉金術師): AWS 101 Cloud Computing Seminar

I attended Amazon Web Services (AWS) 101 Cloud Computing which organized by Amazon (Hong Kong) on 1 March 2012 and would like to share the seminar below.

The speaker was Mr. Kingsley Wood (AWS Business Develop, APAC). He briefed Amazon.com's three businesses included Consumer Business, Seller Business and IT Infrastructure Business (e.g. AWS).

Firstly, Mr. Wood explained what was Cloud Computing. Five key characteristics of cloud computing were shown as follows:

1) Elastic Capacity (Scaling up and down in minutes and optimize resources based on your demand)

2) Faster time to market (Infrastructure is no longer a barrier; Easier to test different solutions and to deploy worldwide)

3) No initial investment (No CAPEX) (Without upfront costs for starting and no termination fees/long-term commitments)

4) Pay as you go, pay for what you use (Pay servers by the hour; Pay storage per Gigabyte; Pay data transfer per Gigabyte; So OPEX (running cost) could be tuned.)

5) Focus on your business (Less time spent on repetitive tasks and leverage the scale of AWS)

Then Mr. Wood quoted his CTO statement that AWS was a Cloud Platform.

Each Regions had two or more zone.

There were four key applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

1) Enterprise Applications (e.g. Capgemini, LIONSGATE and Shell)

2) Web Applications (e.g. NETFLIX, PBS and yelp)

3) Big Data & High Performance Computing (e.g. NASA, razorfish and Harvard Medical School)

4) Disaster Recovery & Archive (e.g. HITACHI, NASDAQ and SmugMug)

No. 1 priority in AWS was "Security". Mr. Wood said they achieved ISO 27001 for all data centers. The details of security would be found in Risk and Compliance Whitepaper (See reference).