adesso sponsored talk by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels at JUG Berlin Brandenburg On May 17th adesso AG sponsored an Amazon event at Java User Group Berlin Brandenburg. Today, Amazon is more than an online book store. Since 2006 Amazon.com, through Amazon Web Services LLC, has been offering developer customers access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform.

After an introduction by me Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, gave the first talk of the evening.

He introduced the audience to the original Amazon IT system. Realizing that Amazon’s growth potential was limited due to the way the system was built, Amazon changed the system’s architecture drastically. Even the organizational structure was changed, forming teams that would each be responsible for one specified business service unit- including the development of the service as well as its operation.

However, even after the reorganization the engineers spent 70% of their time on scaling the infrastructure and only 30% on creating the new business logic. So the next step was to create a platform that would eliminate this burden and at the same time wouldn’t restrict the engineers. This was one of the starting points of Amazon Web Services (AWS) e.g. for virtual computers (EC2) and storage (S3).

Later on, services like SimpleDB - a very scalable data store - were developed. The current numbers for the services are very impressive: S3 currently stores 339 billion objects and every day Amazon adds the equivalent amount of server capacity to AWS that was once used to run all of Amazon in the year 2000 – when it was a $2.76 billion USD enterprise.

Next to talk was Attila Narin, Senior Manager at the Solutions Architecture of AWS. He gave an interesting presentation on the architectural principles for applications in the Cloud.

Our third guest speaker, Carlos Conde, showed the employment of Amazon Elastic Beanstalk which is an impressively easy to use infrastructure for Java applications.

With well over 150 participants the event was well received and gave a good insight into AWS and its Cloud services. The guest speaker’s talks emphasized the importance of Cloud services being the infrastructure of the next generation Dr. Werner Vogels gave an entertaining look behind the scenes of Amazon, its infrastructure and its Cloud offerings.

Thanks to all involved for making this possible!

Labels: Amazon, AWS, Beanstalk, Werner Vogels

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