Amazon Web Services, every mention
215 scenes (2022) · ← back to Amazon Web Services
tap a year for its mentions
every year 2022 anyone David Rosenthal 162Ben Gilbert 102Steve Ballmer 7Ben Thompson 7Christina Cacioppo 3Sam Bankman-Fried 1Packy McCormick 1Mario Gabriele 1Brinton Johns 1Andrew Marks 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Amazon Web Services comes up
Stratechery (with Ben Thompson) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:40:26 Ben Gilbert David and I did seven hours of Amazon.com and then a big AWS episode, and our, I mean, at least my big takeaway was, it is day two, and day two is about becoming a profitable company where the big sell story of tomorrow is realized today,…
- ▶ 1:42:24 David Rosenthal Do you think that applies to AWS too, or is that different?
- ▶ 1:42:28 Ben Thompson Realistically, the challenge for AWS is number one, what's going to happen with the real dry up in startup formation and easy money in that space.
- ▶ 1:42:40 Ben Thompson They're sort of the default choice for startups.
- ▶ 1:43:30 Ben Thompson AWS is the Microsoft word of cloud providers in that they have an absolute absurd number of features and the interface is pretty terrible, but every single customer is completely dependent on one of those features.
- ▶ 1:43:47 Ben Thompson And that actually ends up being their modes.
- ▶ 1:43:49 Ben Gilbert We were researching the episode and we were talking to long-time AWS veterans to sort of understand the mental framework to talk about them today, and that became very clear that AWS doesn't deprecate features.
- ▶ 1:44:00 Ben Gilbert Amazon will kill stuff, kill a Fire Phone, kill local delivery for food, they'll kill all kinds of stuff, but in AWS land, if a customer is depending on something, AWS's long-term enterprise value is determined by customers believing that…
- ▶ 1:44:16 Ben Gilbert They don't deprecate services, even when those services end up flipping upside down on the unit economics, and they have to, like, maintain a costly service that they never figured out how to optimize.
- ▶ 1:44:26 Ben Thompson Right, and every time a customer does something custom for AWS, it's a lock-in, right?
- ▶ 1:44:57 Ben Thompson Well, Passport's not moving off AWS.
- ▶ 1:45:31 Ben Thompson And Amazon doesn't WS obviously Microsoft is doing that with Azure and the Silicon Valley companies are just very, very bad at that.
- ▶ 1:54:49 Ben Gilbert We've got market size unconstrained with the original AWS logo.
Enron · Acquired
- ▶ 3:31:11 Ben Gilbert You can get a market size unconstrained shirt in two different variations with the original AWS logo inspired design.
Qualcomm · Acquired
- ▶ 2:24:38 David Rosenthal Like we did the AWS episode.
- ▶ 2:24:43 David Rosenthal We talked about on the AWS episode, like snowball and snowmobile and like getting data to and from the cloud.
Benchmark Part I · Acquired
- ▶ 12:59 David Rosenthal It wasn't like you could just have an idea for a company, spin something up on AWS, put it on the internet, get distribution for free on social.
- ▶ 1:19:10 David Rosenthal It's like the AWS episode and the like multiple origins of AWS.
- ▶ 1:35:27 David Rosenthal The Jeff Bezos mega theme that we talk about all the time that we dove deep in the last episode on AWS of, you know, focus on what makes your beer taste better.
- ▶ 2:10:27 David Rosenthal There was no AWS yet.
- ▶ 2:17:30 David Rosenthal But now the interesting, there is this interregnum period, like it wasn't until after AWS that all this became possible, which wasn't until the mid 2000.
- ▶ 2:42:01 David Rosenthal And he also got all of these new folks and Bill got what AWS meant for the industry and Series A investing and the difference between formation stage and seed investing and investing in data and traction.
- ▶ 2:43:12 David Rosenthal That all of a sudden became true at that moment in time, thanks to AWS, thanks to the Facebook platform, and where you could now do these series A's, these still early stage quote unquote investments, where there was no product risk, there…
Amazon Web Services · Acquired
- ▶ 2:41 Ben Gilbert Well, listeners, of course, on our last episode, we talked about Amazon's retail business, and today we are talking about Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing pioneer, and those margin percentages that I just used are the real ones for…
- ▶ 2:57 Ben Gilbert AWS's revenue is only about 15% the size of Amazon's massive retail business, but their profits, or the operating income, to be specific, from AWS
- ▶ 3:13 Ben Gilbert I think it's the case that every year since 2015, when they started breaking out AWS's financials, the total operating income from AWS has actually been bigger than the retail business.
- ▶ 10:48 David Rosenthal So I don't even know what the right word is to use to describe AWS.
- ▶ 10:57 David Rosenthal I don't think there's anything you can say that captures how big and how important AWS is.
- ▶ 11:31 David Rosenthal But everybody also needed to be on the internet and the internet runs on AWS.
- ▶ 11:41 David Rosenthal So there's no like everything store book dedicated to AWS.
- ▶ 11:50 David Rosenthal And there actually are quite a few conflicting and competing stories about what the true origin is of AWS.
- ▶ 12:41 Ben Gilbert But almost none of these spend a material amount of time on AWS other than
- ▶ 12:51 David Rosenthal So we identify, you're referring to one origin story of AWS.
- ▶ 12:56 David Rosenthal We identified not one, not two, not three, but four separate origin stories.
- ▶ 13:04 David Rosenthal I think there is something important to learn about what AWS is and about Amazon and about Amazon culture in all of these.
- ▶ 18:16 David Rosenthal It's not what we're talking about with AWS.
- ▶ 18:23 Ben Gilbert How is Amazon supposed to serve their AWS customers if all of them are on excess capacity during Q four at all?
- ▶ 18:32 Ben Gilbert and I just took a dependency and all of my streaming is happening on AWS.
- ▶ 19:08 David Rosenthal The, at the time, AWS CTO, now CTO of all of Amazon, who wrote flat out in a Quora post in 20 11, quote, the excess capacity story is a myth.
- ▶ 19:23 David Rosenthal Actually, within two months after launch, AWS would have already burned through the excess amazon.com capacity.
- ▶ 19:31 David Rosenthal Amazon Web Services was always considered a business by itself with the expectation
- ▶ 20:41 David Rosenthal And, you know, I didn't even really realize before diving into this, the depth of innovation of what AWS was and what Amazon was doing and led them to it is so beyond anything else that was happening at the time.
- ▶ 21:36 David Rosenthal There is a similar sort of figure involved in inspiring the vision for AWS, and that is Tim O'Reilly.
- ▶ 28:08 David Rosenthal That is called Amazon Web Services.
- ▶ 28:32 David Rosenthal This is called Amazon Web Services, but it is not.
- ▶ 28:45 David Rosenthal Amazon Web Services lives within the Amazon Associates program, and that is run by a guy named Colin Breyer, which is very, very fun because Colin goes on to do many things, including recently
- ▶ 29:11 David Rosenthal But for now, in 2002, Colin technically becomes the first head of AWS.
- ▶ 29:18 Ben Gilbert And that was just within Amazon Associates at this point, because the whole point in this origin story, the scope of the ambition of AWS was to make available assets of Amazon.com to our affiliates, to Amazon Associates, who want to…
- ▶ 30:03 David Rosenthal But what I think is so important about number two, even though it leads to AWS, that is the creation of AWS, but not the AWS we know and love, but it's this idea of web two dot O
- ▶ 30:30 Ben Gilbert And I think people today have heard AWS so many times that they sort of forget that it's a little bit of a misnomer.
- ▶ 30:38 Ben Gilbert It's still called Amazon Web Services, but
- ▶ 30:41 Ben Gilbert The vast majority of what is happening when customers are paying the ludicrous amount of revenue to Amazon to access AWS is not web services.
- ▶ 31:50 David Rosenthal They've launched Amazon Web Services, Web two dot, oh, you know, blah, blah, blah.
- ▶ 33:22 David Rosenthal This is just so far until everything we think about with technology companies now and how things run, it's all thanks to AWS.
- ▶ 52:28 David Rosenthal They also are a technology company run on APIs because today, you know, fast forward, the legacy of everything AWS creates here is Stripe.
- ▶ 55:34 David Rosenthal Everything we just described so far in AWS origin story number three is related to software engineering and the amazon.com code base.
- ▶ 55:45 David Rosenthal But what AWS is, is abstracted hardware IT infrastructure and software too, but the core like S three EC two, that's IT infrastructure.
- ▶ 59:39 David Rosenthal Financial projections on there, so there's no financial projections in this document, and then he whiteboards them out on the spot in the meeting with the STM and the board where he's proposing this big grand vision to take over Amazon Web…
- ▶ 1:00:35 David Rosenthal Colin Breyer, who was running AWS until this point, Andy and Colin swap places.
- ▶ 1:00:42 David Rosenthal So Andy goes in, takes over AWS.
- ▶ 1:00:50 Ben Gilbert Andy right away took over the publishing of images via the Amazon Associates API, that sort of fledgling AWS.
- ▶ 1:01:41 David Rosenthal Adam, of course, would later leave AWS to become CEO of Tableau and is now back at AWS where he is now CEO of AWS.
- ▶ 1:02:12 David Rosenthal Do you know who else was in that first wave of external recruits who come in to join AWS?
- ▶ 1:02:27 David Rosenthal Which totally makes sense that Twilio would come out of AWS.
- ▶ 1:02:35 David Rosenthal He does take over AWS.
- ▶ 1:02:38 David Rosenthal Absolutely builds and leads AWS from what it was, which was very different into what it is today.
- ▶ 1:03:09 David Rosenthal They're talking about the origin of AWS.
- ▶ 1:04:57 David Rosenthal That's what AWS is today.
- ▶ 1:05:21 David Rosenthal So unlike myth number one about AWS origins, you couldn't just take excess amazon.com it capacity and externalize it.
- ▶ 1:06:47 David Rosenthal EC two is elastic compute cloud, which is the compute counterpart to the storage part of AWS in S three.
- ▶ 1:08:12 David Rosenthal So that's sort of the most obvious crack in the official narrative of the AWS origin, which brings us
- ▶ 1:08:19 David Rosenthal To the fourth origin story of AWS, the, uh, dissenting narrative, if you will.
- ▶ 1:10:42 David Rosenthal Yes, separately from the rest of AWS.
- ▶ 1:13:51 David Rosenthal The vision document proposing the AWS business and outlining the initial set of services for AWS, including our compute service EC two was finished and presented to the executive team in September, 2003.
- ▶ 1:15:07 David Rosenthal The official version now of the AWS history of it was all centrally planned.
- ▶ 1:16:51 David Rosenthal And I think that actually is also how AWS launched.
- ▶ 1:18:13 David Rosenthal So when S three launched, probably at the same time that you were playing around with it, a truly world-class, fantastic engineer at Microsoft at the time, by the name of James Hamilton, who's now an S team member and SVP distinguished…
- ▶ 1:19:41 Ben Gilbert So no joke, David, every month I get a bill from AWS for like 71 cents and I have no idea what old project it was for, but it's one of these things where it's like it's priced so dynamically.
- ▶ 1:20:02 Ben Gilbert But because it was an abandoned project for which I do not know what the email address to log into AWS is from whatever team I was working on, I kind of just don't care.
- ▶ 1:22:34 Ben Gilbert Themes for why AWS became successful.
- ▶ 1:22:50 Ben Gilbert But for startups who were building something from scratch, who could go on to become 50 plus billion dollar companies, my god, let's get them on AWS.
- ▶ 1:23:02 Ben Gilbert I mean, I remember the first time I met Dave Chappelle, who was doing developer evangelism for AWS early with Jeff Barr and so many other folks there.
- ▶ 1:23:10 Ben Gilbert It was just a breath of fresh air where every happy hour you went to, there were AWS people who were giving you tons of free credits, who were helping introduce you to other people for your startup.
- ▶ 1:23:28 Ben Gilbert Obvious default that you would build on AWS because it felt so ingrained with how you make startups is you start an AWS account for the thing that you're going to build.
- ▶ 1:24:14 David Rosenthal And then it was like, oh, well, you know, startups can run in AWS, but like real enterprises wouldn't do that.
- ▶ 1:24:24 David Rosenthal Non-differentiated, you know, non-mission critical stuff in AWS, but we're not going to put our mission critical stuff in AWS.
- ▶ 1:24:36 Ben Gilbert So I think there's this interesting, obvious first beachhead of customers that are startups, but when you think about the enterprise adoption and how eventually now, you know, your bank's application is on AWS and everything is moving to…
- ▶ 1:25:42 David Rosenthal Slide on this, where he talks about the six reasons AWS wins versus traditional infrastructure for enterprises, and it's exactly what you said.
- ▶ 1:25:59 David Rosenthal Two, you're getting lower OpEx than you could on your own thanks to AWS's economies of scale.
- ▶ 1:26:15 David Rosenthal AWS is elastic.
- ▶ 1:26:38 David Rosenthal You're instantly global on AWS versus when you run your own on-prem data centers, you're like wherever your data centers are.
- ▶ 1:28:51 David Rosenthal And then AWS shifted it to, okay, spend 70% of your time on software development and 30% of your time on worrying about our APIs and your infrastructure.
- ▶ 1:29:13 Ben Gilbert Now, AWS in its earliest days, let's call it the first couple years, was really startup focused.
- ▶ 1:29:45 Ben Gilbert So very quickly, AWS could serve these two markets of startups and the lift and shift enterprise.
- ▶ 1:32:03 Ben Gilbert Actually, we're going to use AWS instead.
- ▶ 1:32:05 David Rosenthal We're moving all of it to AWS, and I believe Netflix is still to this day, I think, 100% on AWS.
- ▶ 1:32:31 David Rosenthal Aren't you worried about being on AWS?
- ▶ 1:32:32 David Rosenthal And he's like, no, I'm not worried at all about being on AWS.
- ▶ 1:32:51 Ben Gilbert But the Netflix one, I mean, a lot of people were afraid to use AWS early on because they felt like they didn't want to do business with Amazon if they were a retailer, or they didn't want to do business with Amazon if they were in video,…
- ▶ 1:33:07 Ben Gilbert Matter of factly and so forcefully was him saying, you can trust that AWS is different than Amazon.
page 1 of 3 · 100 scenes per page · newest episode first next →