SMW: Amazon's CDN - "The only thing you need is a credit card"

San Jose, CA - Speaking before a packed room at Streaming Media West, Amazon CTO Dr. Werner Vogels said companies could purchase Amazon's new content distribution service in a matter of minutes with a credit card and also rapidly scale it either "up or down."  

Vogels spent the first half of his keynote positioning Amazon beyond its role as one of the world's largest online retailers. "It's hard to think of Amazon as a technology customer... retail is possible due to the technologies the company has developed."  

Initially, development groups within the company set up and ran their own servers. As Amazon grew and started new projects, its in-house developers continued to run into "undifferentiated heavy lifting," such as dealing with hardware acquisition, maintenance, and keeping sites and services up. A decision was made to develop and use a shared platform "so developers could focus on development."  

Today, Amazon offers the same services to outside developers and companies. Over 400,000 developers have registered to use Amazon's various web services, and outside applications services now consume more bandwidth than Amazon's own brands. Startup companies no longer have to buy their own servers, but can purchase services on an as-needed basis. "Maybe the VC would give you money for 5,000 servers, but you wouldn't have much equity left," Vogels stated. "You push CapEx to Opex... it's a tremendous shift."

Online video has gone though a "a pretty big revolution," with a big cost reduction on production tools, a low-cost distribution mechanism through the Internet, access to "billions" of customers, a better understanding of effective business models and a big increase in content products. "Consumers are aware of different products," said Vogels. "The time they consider broadcast as the only choice is gone."

Providing the CDN as a service provides numerous advantages, Vogels asserted.  Service can be turned on in a "matter of minutes" and scaled up or down; scaling down due to drops in demand (during the night, for instance) is just as important as being able to scale up. It's cost effective, can be bought on a pay-as-you-go basis, uses a reliable and proven (Amazon) infrastructure and is also secure. "The only thing you need is a credit card," he emphasized.

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