Amazon publicly announced the Amazon Web Services (AWS) in March 2006, so the company has 10 years of experience in offering cloud computing services. “As evidenced by the more than one million active AWS customers, they have been telling us they have realized tremendous value from leveraging AWS Cloud services. In fact, 90% to 95% of the AWS product roadmap is driven largely by customers’ feedback, and we continue to add new feature, services and invent on behalf of our customers. We have been removing the heavy lifting of managing infrastructure to make it easier for customers, allowing them to focus on their core competencies. Many of our technology services are full managed services such as the Amazon Redshift for data warehousing in the Cloud,” said Nicholas Walton, ASEAN head of AWS.
Nicholas Walton, ASEAN head of AWS
Amazon Redshift addresses the complexity of traditional data warehouses that often require significant time and resource to administer, especially for large datasets. In addition, the financial cost associated with building, maintaining, and growing self-managed, on-premises data warehouses is very high. Redshift not only lowers the cost of a data warehouse, but also makes it easy to analyze large amounts of data very quickly.
“It is simple and cost-effective to use as companies can start small for US$0.25 per hour with no commitments, and scale to petabytes for US$1,000 per terabyte per year, which is less than a tenth the cost of traditional solutions,” Walton said.
In the case of AWS, the cited top five reasons why companies are moving to the AWS cloud are:
- “AWS lets customers quickly spin up technology infrastructure resources as they need them, deploying hundreds or even thousands of servers in minutes. This means they can very quickly develop and roll out new applications, and it means teams can experiment and innovate more quickly and frequently. If an experiment fails, you can always de-provision those servers without risk,” Walton said.
- Cost savings. AWS allows customers to trade capital expense for variable expense, paying for IT as they consume it. The variable expense is much lower than what customers can do for themselves because of AWS’s economies of scale.
For example, in the Philippines, Globe Telecom is able to accelerate innovation by testing new ideas in less than 20 minutes and has reduced its total cost of ownership by 40% to 60 percent using AWS.
The International Rice Research Institute, also from the Philippines, has downsized its datacenters, moved much of its IT infrastructure to AWS and cut IT costs by 50 percent. - “Customers used to over-provision to ensure they had enough capacity to handle their business operations at the peak level of activity. Now, they can provision the number of technology resources that they actually need, knowing they can instantly scale up or down along with the needs of their business, which also reduces cost and improves the customer’s ability to meet their user’s demands,” Walton said.
- Breadth of functionality that exists in AWS. “We have more than any other platform, and we continue to add new capabilities and new services at an accelerating pace. In 2011, we released over 80 significant services and features; in 2012, nearly 160; in 2013, 280, and in 2014, we launched 516. In 2015, we launched 722 new services, up nearly 40% year-over- year. Customers benefit from this continual evolution, innovation and iteration, because they get the latest features or enhancements instantly,” Walton said.
- Globally deploy in minutes. AWS has the concept of a “region”, which is a physical location around the world where it has clusters of multiple datacenters. It calls each group of logical datacenters an “Availability Zones”. Using AWS, customers can leverage 32 Availability Zones across 12 geographic regions worldwide to go global.
AWS sees broad adoption across a spectrum of industries such as telecommunication, oil and gas, financial services, business process outsourcing, healthcare, logistics, e-commerce, media among many others. Some of the public references of AWS customers in the Philippines include: Globe Telecom, Voyager Innovation, Seaoil, Lenddo, Lifetrack Medical, International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Pinoy Travel, Kalibrr, AVA and Payroll Hero.
Some of the common use cases in the Philippines include running core enterprise applications, performing data analytics, building e-commerce platforms, launching new businesses, hosting websites, developing social and mobile applications.
Already, in January 2014, AWS established the CloudFront edge location in Manila to enable businesses an easy way to distribute content to end users in the Philippines with low latency and high data transfer speeds. This Manila edge location is one of the 54 global network’s points-of- presence that also supports Amazon Route 53, a scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service. Content such as entire website (including dynamic, static, streaming and interactive content), images, videos, media files and downloadable software are distributed with high performance and low latency to end users via the edge locations.
