Amazon’s CTO is on stage now.

“Web Scale computing – compete on ideas, not resources”

Werner is talking about the importance of getting the boring infrastructure out of the way, to enable organisations to concentrate on their unique value/function. He’s using the recent example from Doug Kaye, about building Gigavox on the back of Amazon infrastructure components such as S3 and EC2.

As Werner says,

What if… launching a new business on the web was simple?

What if… you only had to focus on the business

What if… you could manage growth more easily

What if… you only had to compete on ideas, not resources?

He’s recommending a paper by John Hagel and John Seely Brown, from 2005. Ah, thank you Google; Here it is [pdf].

The paper talks about a move toward being able to ‘pull’ resources when you need them, in a model that is flexible, modular, loosely coupled, participatory, rapid, and more. Sounds pretty relevant to Amazon’s model, and to ours…

Forces driving alternative resource models…

• Increasing uncertainty
• Growing abundance
• Intensifying competition
• Growing power of the customer
• Greater focus on learning and improvisation

Resource management in an uncertain world…

• Acquire resources on demand
• Release resources when no longer needed
• Pay for what you need

It can be difficult, traditionally, to develop and scale a web business; you need to put so much infrastructure in place before you can launch, and you need to anticipate growth and demand well in advance. It’s unrealistic, it’s hard, and it’s ridiculously expensive.

It’s easier, Werner argues, to pull resources on demand. Just in Time manufacturing for the IT generation? JIT didn’t always work, of course…

Werner recommends Getting Real.

Resources in the Pull Model – scalable infrastructure that allow your applications to meet infinite demand, cheaply and reliably.

Amazon S3, EC2, SQS; scalable, cost-effective, reliable, simple, compatible

Example of smugmug; storing an additional 10Tb of data in S3 every month; and costs rise as usage rises, rather than ahead of use. This one’s been widely talked about before, and there are more details from SmugMug’s Don MacAskill here, and in some subsequent posts.

I blogged about one of Werner’s podcasts earlier this year. At the time, I wrote

“The points that Werner was making sounded very similar to internal discussions at Talis as we continue to grow the Calypso Platform.”

Having seen/heard him in the flesh, I stand by that. I’m glad we’re talking to Amazon…

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