blogAmazon a good host
29 September 2007Amazon Web Services (AWS) held an event to promote their Startup Challenge in Cambridge on Thursday, Sept. 27, 2007. Two aspects of the event were impressive:
- AWS makes sense for developing sites because their services handle a lot of the routine aspects of scaling a site. This isn’t really a new concept - many web hosts offer infrastructure services that let sites focus on what they do. What makes AWS compelling are the pricing and self-service aspects of their business model. The cost of AWS seems to be significantly lower than that of competitive services, and the usage-based pricing is flexible enough that the costs can be managed relative to volume. And there seems to be low administrative overhead associated with the processes for establishing and managing services.
- Many of the companies using AWS are extraordinary. Most of the startups who presented in Cambridge are doing innovative things from a technology perspective, and several were very interesting from a business perspective as well:
- AideRSS - AideRSS is solving an important problem: Helping blog readers to find what’s relevant. In less than a year, they’ve built a valuable service that prioritizes content based on popularity and have ramped up to handling millions of posts daily. They’re looking at adding greater personalization in the near future.
- Praxeon - Praxeon has a very cool technology called Fingerprint that gleans important concepts from unstructured text, allowing health care providers to quickly search, organize, and get insight from medical documents.
The level of goodwill toward AWS among the entrepreneurial community is high. They’re trying hard to incorporate feedback into their design. For example, customers have been asking for database hosting (*), which would make AWS a more complete infrastructure for a substantial class of prospective customers. Overall, Amazon have put together a compelling service and are demonstrating a commitment to working closely with their customers to make sure they succeed.
(*) S3 is an object store, not a database. Apparently database storage is best done today on AWS by running your own DBMS on EC2, which is oriented toward computation rather than large-scale storage. Some companies are hosting databases external to AWS, then using EC2 to access and crunch the data. One of the participants is scaling very rapidly using this using this approach. Performance and I/O of the database host are key in this scenario, as EC2 isn’t likely to be a bottleneck.
Mark Soper
