AWS: Everyone’s Doing It

It was reported earlier this year that Amazon S3 had reached 5 billion stored objects. AWS is cost-effective and easy. That’s why everyone’s using it.

Some startups use AWS as their primary storage/processing mechanism, while others use it as secondary. In the primary approach, just about everything runs on AWS. In secondary, AWS is used as a failover/backup mechanism. It provides additional storage or acts as a way to roll out extra features or services without adding to your own infrastructure.

What’s ironic is that this approach has been tried before but never gained wide-spread adoption. Sun, for example, has Network.com, which offers “flexible access to the pay-per-use computing resources of the Sun Grid Compute Utility.” But when you look at the site, it is targeted at “big” compute problems like computational mathematics, CAD, EDA, and financial services.

What AWS capitalizes on is an overall trend: the wave of low cost available infrastructure and resources, from open source to off shore development that are changing the ability to test new ideas and iterate products at incredible speed. AWS taps into this wave and helps expand it.

I frequently get asked by entrepreneurs if people are using AWS. The resounding answer is: yes.

Now I just hope Amazon is on a path to solve the resulting capacity challenges.