Amazon Launches Redshift Data Warehousing Service, S3 Cloud Storage Price Cut

By samdizzy

Amazon Web Services Senior VP Andy Jassy, speaking at today's AWS re:Invent conference, announed the Redshift data warehousing service and an S3 cloud storage price cut. Here's a live blog of Jassy's keynote.

1. Behind the Name: The re:Invent conference was named to reflect (A) new businesses that are inventing their models using AWS, and (B) existing businesses that are re-inventing their organizations.

2. Big reach: AWS has hundreds of thousands of customers in more than 190 countries.

3. Here comes the partners: Jassy mentioned a range of integrators and ISVs in the Amazon parnter ecosystem. He told partners to focus on AWS Marketplace, which allows ISVs to sell their applications to Amazon Web Services customers. Key names mentioned included Cap Gemini.

4. Big on Storage: Amazon Simple Storage Service now stores over 1 trillion objects.

5. Big Data: Elastic Map Reduce, which involves Hadoop, service runs around 4 million clusters in the past two years.

6. Big Growth: Amazon, the retailer, was a $5.2 billion business in 2003. Today, AWS adds enough server capacity to handle a new $5 billion business every day.

7. Global Reach: AWS operates in nine regions, 25 availability zones and 38 edge locations.

8. The Big Benefit: Jassy noted that Amazon and its customers are benefitting from a "circle" of scalability that flows from one bullet point to the next…

9. Obvious Benefits: Jassy pointed out the usual cloud benefits that customers are embracing, including OpEx vs. CapEx, speed to market, global reach, and more.

10. Careful of Cloud Washers: Jassy noted that traditonal IT vendors are now hyping their legacy IT products for private clouds. But private clouds lack.

11. Taking Shots at IBM, Oracle, HP: Jassy, though the creative use of graphics, noted that IBM, Oracle and HP all want to sell you high-margin integrated hardware and software. Jassy never mentioned IBM, Oracle or HP by name. Nor did the graphics — which were classic in design. We've got the photos and will display them later.

"You don't flip a switch overnight to become a high volume, low margin business," Jassy said, while hinting that Amazon isn't overly concerned about the clouds IBM, HP and Oracle are building — again, without mentioning them by name. 

12. NetFlix and The Big Switch: CEO Reed Hastings said Nicholas Carr's book, The Big Switch, played a role in him betting on the cloud — or more precisely, Amazon's cloud. 

13. It's Still Early: Hastings said we're still at the first phase of cloud computing. The next phase is the ability to move running live instances. VMware does this today, he noted. "It's technically possible but extremely difficult to do it at scale."

14. Our Focus: Enable any application to run on AWS, Jassy Said.

15. The Next AWS Service: It involves data warehousing. It's called Redshift and it's in preview now. It's about one-tenth the cost of traditional data warehousing services, he said.

16. Mission Critical Applications: Jassy said questions about running mission-critical apps in the cloud have ended. Going forward, it's a question of which ones to move first and how quickly. SAP also took to the stage and endorsed the AWS relationship.

Keep checking back. More updates coming.