Amazon had launched S3 , the Amazon’s on demand storage service in 2006. In July’ 06, S3 held 800,000 million objects. Now it has the number 5 billion. The best day so far is 920,847,345 objects added and the peak second record is 16,607 objects.
Now Amazon is making good on its claim to handle the muck, the undifferentiated heavy lifting at Web scale-infrastructure as a pay-by-the-drink service-10 cents per CPU hour. Customers for Amazon’s various infrastructure services include many startups, and even Microsoft.
“Seventy percent of creating an application is things on the back end, and it is similar in almost every Web scale application. None of this stuff helps your idea get any better or gets your product to market faster, but it has to be done at a very high quality level. If not, it can torpedo your successful product...it’s the price of admission.” You also have to loop through cycles, he added, revising products and the infrastructure.
Though Amazon is not making money yet on its infrastructure services. “We are already rapidly deploying new infrastructure, disks and servers, to support [growth]. EC2, for example, is completely capacity constrained and invite only. For S3 Amazon is taking all comers” Bezos says.
He added the Amazon would like its current customers to get good service before taking on new customers. They are also trying to get themselves into position where they are demand constrained rather than capacity constrained
Regarding where the infrastructure business fits in, Bezos said, “This is a new incremental business. Our retail and seller facing businesses are doing very well and have very large market sizes.”