The market value of AWS is estimated to exceed 100 billion dollars, close to Oracle and IBM
Amazon is a collection of contradictions. It has been losing money for more than ten years in a row, but its market value has been rising steadily. Instead of using slides for internal meetings, write paper. While complaining that the company is mean, the employees admit that they have learned a lot. Perhaps the only thing that is not contradictory is that they all think Jeff Bezos is a good Visionary.
Amazon nuclear fusion
Amazon's technology is both ordinary and mysterious, which is generally because Amazon has never created any black technology since it started as a book seller, and each technology is too grounded and seems to be a bit of a loser. The mystery is that Amazon is never happy to share its own technology (there are a lot of lectures and trainings inside, but there is no Engieering Blog outside), but it can build an empire of technology like AWS.
One of the best things Amazon did in engineering was in 2002 when Bezos ordered:
· All teams must open program function modules and data and provide interfaces
· The module communication of all teams must pass through these interfaces
· No other communication situation between all modules
· The design of all modules should consider that the interface can be opened to the world in the future
· Those who don't do this will go away
This is the famous SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). In China, there are few listed companies or start-ups that can get its essence. More than a decade ago, Bezos dared to apply it on such a large scale, and its brain and courage are not generally large.
In other words, the AWS form was taken into consideration at that time, so that one of the requirements was to open the interface to the world.
DevOps formation
Before Amazon, no company had applied SOA on such a large scale, so the consulting company could do nothing about the experience of any other company. Amazon has also learned a lot of experience in building large-scale services on the road of large-scale SOA. Because SOA is objective to the ability required by engineers, DevOps culture has been formed.
SOA has a serious problem: services are connected to each other. When the system goes wrong, it often requires a ticket to pass back dozens of times between several groups to find the real reason. In addition, if the upstream service fails, the function and performance of the downstream service will be seriously affected. "Because the problems encountered in SOA must be solved by devs rather than supported by ops, devops has the role of devops. So devops is more suitable for exploring new areas, especially new areas across several layers of network models." (Supplement from Amazon Xia Jie)
In order to solve these problems, Amazon has created a large number of internal tools in addition to the notorious Oncall to help monitor and manage code and services. Each group can be responsible for its own services and solve problems as quickly as possible. Of course, employees often complain about Amazon's troubles. Compared with Microsoft, Google and other companies, Amazon has really squeezed the residual value of employees to the greatest extent (Jeff is a Wall Street capitalist with a professional background).
At the same time, these internal tools also greatly improve the work efficiency of employees, allowing the product to update and iterate at the fastest speed. One engineer can complete the tasks of code writing, code testing, version management, deployment and online, service monitoring, etc. So an engineer is develoepr, QA and deployer.
The founders of Facebook and Airbnb have all said that they have learned a lot from Amazon culture, but perhaps Jeff is not interested in the output of ideology. Amazon has never publicized some of its beliefs. Now it seems that this has lost some advantages in the appeal to developers. I think this may be a small stumbling block to Amazon's development in the future.
In any case, DevOps has since become one of Amazon's cultures.
The Rise of AWS
At present, in many large domestic Internet companies, internal tools are still independent, and different departments often make wheels repeatedly. In American Internet companies, it has long been a common sense to unify internal tools. Amazon is one of the most active, valued and early companies to do so. After unifying the tools, engineers will start to think that they can either turn them into products and provide them to other companies, or open source the framework and provide it to developers.
Amazon chose productization, so AWS was born. From the first service EC2, so far, the typical ones are virtualization, file storage, database, data warehousing, code management, automatic deployment, continuous release, service monitoring, service configuration, automatic operation and maintenance, identity management, and message queue. All internal tools from Amazon. Before I left, I knew several internal tools that were being productized. AWS is no longer limited to the production of internal tools, but also actively integrates the latest open source technologies and adds them to the AWS lineup.
The advantage of this is that compared with Google and Facebook, which keep trying and shutting down various projects, AWS services almost never fail, because these tools have been used internally for many years and countless times, the needs have been very clear, and the tools have also been polished. Such nearly invincible services and products have made AWS rise rapidly. Even Microsoft and Google quickly responded and started to do Azure and Google Cloud. Due to the lack of internal causes, they were eventually left behind.
How far ahead is AWS compared to other companies? When I attended the Amazon internal conference, I mentioned that Google, which is famous for its technology, also launched similar services after AWS launched S3. At that time, Speaker said that Google's internal API documents for storage services are applicable to S3 but not their own services. Why?
As of 2015, AWS's annual revenue has increased by 81%, with a revenue of $7.1 billion. Salesforce, the enterprise service company with the second largest growth, has increased by 24%. AWS, as a department of Amazon, is estimated to have a market value of more than $100 billion if it is listed separately, far exceeding Salesforce, SAP and other enterprise service companies. It is close to the market value of Oracle, IBM and other once largest giants. In terms of the number of users, AWS ranks first, twice as many as the second to the thirtieth. Recently, I also saw news that Google admitted that it has lagged behind AWS in cloud services, and hoped to fight against excesses in automation. It is undeniable that AWS has risen and taken the first place, and DevOps is one of the factors.
Amazon's Future
In fact, there is nothing to say after writing the last paragraph, but there is always an end to writing an article, so add a few words in the form.
Compared with the "love" of employees of other large companies, employees of Amazon seem to be more willing to laugh at themselves. They often complain about the benefits of Amazon together with employees of other large companies, and laugh at Amazon's fire phone, which makes the stock plummet for three quarters. Bezos is also playing with technology and rockets while opening a 10000 goods store.
I once heard Peter Thiel talk about how to invest in his class. One of them mentioned that Fouder led companies out perform in general, which also took Amazon as an example to make a reverse comparison with Paypal. For Founder, the company is like its own child. So although it's hard for people to understand what Bezos Visionary is thinking sometimes, only Founder, who has devoted all his efforts to the company, can know more about the future of his children. Let's wait and see.
