Amazon AWS: The birth of a prefix

In Amazon’s just-announced financial report for the first quarter of fiscal year 2015, cloud computing unit AWS revenue reached US$1.57 billion, a year-on-year increase of 49%. This is also the first time that Amazon AWS has appeared as an independent department in the financial report; however, in recent years Before, even Amazon itself would not have thought that today's AWS could bring such huge income to itself. In the book "OneClick", there are only a few pages about AWS.

Unintentionally planting willows to create shade

With the gradual arrival of the cloud era, especially the public cloud trend, under the leadership of Werner Vogels, AWS is gradually becoming another golden brand of Amazon. Behind the success of AWS is still Amazon's typical corporate culture: using low-price, high-quality, and flexible products to win users. This is the secret to Amazon’s e-commerce success and the rise of AWS. If Amazon has the mark of Bezos, then when it comes to Amazon AWS, Werner Vogels has to be mentioned. Some people say that Werner Vogels’ personal influence is one of the important factors in determining Amazon’s leadership in the field of cloud computing, which is the so-called determination of a certain company. There are only a few people with technical leadership in the company, and Vogels is one of them. He is also the only person in Amazon besides Bezos who can speak on behalf of Amazon.

In the public cloud market, the leader is not Google, which first proposed cloud computing, nor Microsoft, the dominant player in the PC era, nor IBM, which has traditional IDC genes, but Amazon: this retail website. Amazon WebServices was not originally a project developed by Bezos, but was tinkered with by programmers to optimize the system. This unintentional project received strong support from Bezos after it went online, and has become the basis for many start-up websites today. favorites (such as Instagram and Flipboard both rent AWS services).

After rapid expansion in the past few years, Amazon has formed a dominant market pattern in the public cloud market. Under the Matthew Effect, the AWS ecosystem will naturally become more and more prosperous. The AWS ecological cooperation group is mainly composed of ISVs and SIs: There are currently about 1,500 ISVs. Some ISVs have developed various management and optimization tools based on the AWS platform. Some ISVs have transformed their own software products into SaaS and then bundled them with the AWS platform. A one-stop solution to users' public cloud needs, mutual benefit and win-win results (for example, domestic companies that do enterprise data backup like Dual Backup are using Amazon S3); SI currently has about 900 companies, as an important group close to the needs of enterprise-level users , SI can first explore the public cloud needs of enterprise users, and then introduce AWS to the docking, exert a strong channel communication role, and bring AWS into various vertical fields of the enterprise market.

Become famous in one battle

The most representative or decisive event was that in the first half of 2013, Amazon AWS successfully snatched a US$600 million cloud service order from IBM from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which even led to a book-to-book confrontation between the two companies. Court. In the end, Amazon won this symbolic piece of cake through a U.S. federal court ruling. Since then, Amazon AWS has become famous.

In addition, as an ISSS platform, actively developing public cloud services for enterprises is also the key to the success of AWS. Professional cloud storage service companies such as DropBox and Box are also built on Amazon's AWS. Airbnb, an American short-term rental website, has deployed all its IT systems on AWS from the first day it was founded. Currently, this popular startup has 9 million monthly active users, but only has five IT managers.

Next target: China

Now, the advantages of Amazon AWS are mainly reflected in: 1. Brand awareness. It has been officially in operation for nearly ten years. It has accumulated rich experience in both 2C and 2B, and has even become synonymous with cloud computing in some fields; 2. , Global cloud coverage, AWS has 10 regions around the world, with wide geographical coverage, which is very attractive to multinational companies; 3. A complete ecosystem, based on the Amazon public cloud ecosystem, has been established. There are many system integrators, independent software vendors, hundreds of thousands of enterprise users in this system, and even a large number of enthusiastic and loyal individual developers;

China is a big cake that every multinational company will not give up easily. However, due to the domestic regulations that "data cannot be offshored", it was not until 2013 that Amazon cooperated with Sinnet and Wangsu Technology. Just entered China. In the domestic public cloud market at this time, Alibaba, which has the same e-commerce genes as Amazon, also began to launch its own Alibaba Cloud in 2012, and by virtue of its IaaS advantages, it quickly assembled multiple backup, stack cloud, Lianchuang, Entrepreneurial companies based on SaaS services such as Hezhong Information. Tencent, Kingsoft, etc. have also begun their own deployment at the public cloud level.

Amazon AWS's entry into China directly triggered a price war for public clouds: Alibaba Cloud announced a limited-time 50% discount, Kingsoft Cloud launched a free Bitcoin mining cloud host, and Tencent Cloud made three consecutive price cuts within half a year. …The domestic public cloud market, which is in its early development stage, suddenly became lively.

This year, the concept of "Internet +" was officially mentioned in the government work report, and then became a methodology in the Internet environment. As a new generation of information technology, cloud computing will provide important support for mass entrepreneurship and innovation in the future. This is an opportunity and a challenge for cloud service providers including Amazon. In 2015, the domestic cloud computing market Competition will become more intense.