Amazon CTO makes the case for web services in tight economic times

Vogels

Fresh off the release of Amazon.com's new content delivery network CloudFront, Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels talked up the company's web services to a packed auditorium at the University of Washington.

Casually dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, the voluble Vogels told students and faculty about the history of Amazon's cloud computing efforts, and let drop a few interesting statistics.

Vogels said 440,000 developers are now using Amazon Web Services, which include the S3 storage service and EC2 computing service. There were 29 billion objects in S3 as of October 2008, he said.

Vogels said Amazon's web services, which let businesses access server capacity and computing power online on a pay-as-you-go basis, make even more sense in these tight economic times.

"This model is extremely useful in cases where there is great uncertainty in the market," he said. "If you make the cost of failure as cheap as possible, it also makes the cost of experimentation very low."

Vogels trotted out some well-worn examples of startups that use Amazon's web services, including Animoto, a website that turns photos into musical slideshows (Amazon is an investor), and online photo site SmugMug.

But Vogels also mentioned some examples of web services customers I hadn't heard of before, including live video streaming site Mogulus and the Indianapolis 500 website.

Shortly before Vogels' appearance at UW, Amazon rolled out CloudFront, its new content delivery network, or CDN. CloudFront lets users distribute photos, videos, music and other content. It will compete with other established players in the CDN market, including Akamai and Limelight.