This week I attended a meetup in Philadelphia that featured Jeff Barr from Amazon Web Services. Jeff talked about his personal experience and some exciting things that people are building using S3 and EC2. Most of us have heard of S3, Amazon’s scalable storage infrastructure. Pricing is $0.15 per gigabyte/month. Growth has been tremendous with S3. They don’t release revenues, but according to Jeff as of November they had 10 billion objects stored, up from 5 billion objects in April. EC2 is their other new web service. It stands for Elastic Compute Cloud and is essentially on-demand computing power. The idea is you can scale servers as you need them. All pricing is per instance per hour. The default is $0.10 per for a server with 1.7 GB of memory and 160 GB of storage. For cash-conscious startups EC2 is a godsend. You don’t need to make big ticket hardware purchases and spend only on what you use. EC2 becomes even more important as you begin to grow and need to scale fast (a problem for most startups).
Overall, there are a number of consumer-focused startups using Amazon Web Services, but I haven’t heard much from enterprise players. The lack of service level agreements and guaranteed uptimes are issues that will need to be addressed. Highly regulated industries such as Financial Services and Healthcare will also need to get comfortable with data security. Nevertheless, the cost savings is real. If you are an entrepreneur building a company that’s using AWS selling into the enterprise drop me a line. I’d love to hear your experience thus far and interview you for a follow-up post.
On a side note, it was great to see the local tech community in Philly. A lot of interesting people and ideas. Buzz is definitely in the air.
