

AWS Innovation at Scale – James Hamilton [video] - ook
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIQETrFC_SQ

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mad44
In summary, AWS rides the benefits of economies of scale.
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale))

They design/build their networking gear, full hw/sw stack. This is cheaper and
more reliable (their code is simple/customized to their datacenter use case.)

They also have SingleRoot I/O virtualization at each server: each guest VM
gets its own hardware virtualized link, which is great for reducing the giant
tail at scale problem (google for Jeff Dean's description of the problem.)

Their relational DB system RDS is getting popular: 40% of customers using
them. So they compete with Oracle by offering similar highly-available service
with much less price. They keep adding new relational DBs: Aurora, RedShift,
EBS.

They design/build their power infrastructure. Faster.

They are very customer oriented, they make things simple/painless for customer
use cases. They are obsessed with metrics, measuring everything, with tight
feedback loops to improve things weekly. They rolled 449 new services + major
features in 2014 alone.

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mbesto
Actually, all of what you just mentioned is considered "economies of scope"
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scope](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scope))

 _Here, economies of scope make product diversification efficient if they are
based on the common and recurrent use of proprietary know-how or on an
indivisible physical asset._

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pwarner
These guys are the new x86. On that note I was surprised they actually get
custom chips from Intel, but I guess it makes sense. At the AWS summit in SF
earlier this year the only AWS supplier with a booth was Intel.

