Amazon and the M-Word
It has suddenly become trendy to use “the M-word” when discussing Amazon. Yes, you know the word I mean. I almost don’t even want to say it… but here it goes… Microsoft. I’m not sure when the Microsoft / Bill Gates / 1990s comparisons started, but it is definitely in vogue right now. I suspect Brad Stone’s biography of Amazon, Everything Store, has contributed to the comparison. I also think AWS re:Invent may have helped fuel the fire, as Amazon came across as exactly what it is: a highly innovative, highly dominant, and highly aggressive market leader in “the single greatest disruption of our lifetime” (from Andy Jassy’s keynote). You only needed to watch the body...
Day 3 at re:Invent: Disruption Achieved
Day 3 of re:Invent kicked off with Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, as master of ceremonies. Over the next 90 minutes he handed the mic over to Neil Hunt of Netflix, Adrian Cockcroft of Netflix, Ilya Sukhar of Parse, Greg Duffy of Dropcam, and Mike Curtis of Airbnb. Werner said there is drinking game where you are supposed to take a shot every time someone from Amazon mentions Netflix. If you played this game at this keynote, it must have been a very long day for you. The biggest news was Amazon Kinesis, a real time service for storing and processing big data streams. I read Jeff Barr’s blog and scanned the documentation, and it may be the most innovative new service from Amazon since S3. He also announced RDS support for...
Day 2 at re:Invent: Truman Show
Amazon and their head of AWS, Andy Jassy, officially kicked off day 2 of re:Invent with a 90 minute keynote in a concert-sized auditorium packed with 9K+ attendees. He made a few interesting announcements, including AppStream, WorkSpaces, and CloudTrail (my personal favorite). He also took the time to espouse Amazon’s commitment to their customers, took a soft jab at IBM who is running ads on Vegas buses, discussed Amazon’s belief in continuously lowering prices, and pontificated on the AWS view of private / hybrid clouds. He handed the mic over to other speakers at various times in the keynote, including Jeff Smith, CEO of Suncorp, Stephen Orban, CTO of Dow Jones, Arzhang Kamarei, President of Tradeworx, Kevin Baillie,...
My Jeff Barr Interview
Below is my interview with Jeff Barr, Amazon Chief Evangelist, on day 1 of Amazon re:Invent. There was something surreal about meeting Jeff with a video crew fidgeting over us and a person dusting makeup on our faces. ___ Yes, the beard is a new addition, caused by severe superstition before game 6 ALCS. But I am repurposing it for Movember.
Day 1 at re:Invent: Sold Out
Day 1 of re:Invent is wrapping up, which has been mostly a soft pitch for attendees arriving for the official kick off tomorrow. There was a hackathon, bootcamps, partner meetings, and an evening reception, all generally low key. I must confess to feeling like I walked into a rock concert this morning upon entering the registration room, with a live DJ blaring music that had a little too much affinity for the years 1980-1984 for my tastes. Within minutes of arriving, the registration line grew to 100+ deep as everyone lined up to get their pass and swag (and good swag it was). Usually when a conference host tells you it is “sold out”, I take that as meaning: look at how well we did in getting attendees to the conference, but...
Top 10 Reasons Not To Use Chef
Several years ago after taking a new VPE role, I heard my system administrators throwing around foreign terms like “converging nodes”, “cookbooks”, “knife”, and “recipes.” I had never used Chef, and had the distinct feeling I’d walked into a high tech kitchen. Over the next few weeks, I sought to make sense of our Chef investment, and it wasn’t long though before I was hooked. Over the coming months, the size of our cloud computing infrastructure would triple (700+ servers, 1.5+ PB storage), and Chef became an essential component to managing our growth. But I know managing cloud infrastructure with Chef is not for everyone. So for those of you not using Chef, here are the top 10 reasons to support your...
Heading Off to re:Invent
I’m on a plane tonight headed to Amazon’s 2nd annual AWS user conference. There are several familiar faces on this flight from the local Boston tech community, including Sonian, ParElastic, Acquia, Backupify, Cloudant and more. This is the first of a series of short posts I plan to write while at re:Invent, passing on what I hope will be useful information to anyone interested back home. As much as I have always liked the urban legend that AWS was born from Amazon’s need to manage the holiday season, it is sadly not true. But if you believe Brad Stone’s Everything Store, AWS was actually conceived in 2001-2 when Jeff Bezos’s mission to convert the company from a retailer to a technology company hit a wall: the inability...
Joe Kinsella is a high-tech VPE and startup junkie in the Boston area.