'With the cloud, it is easy to fix defects'

You have travelled from the US to India and you head to the gym at your hotel for your usual workout. You keep your smartphone in the holder on the treadmill and the handset's able to communicate your preferred exercise regime to the treadmill. This is made possible by NFC, but you will need access to the cloud to ensure that this can be done anywhere, points out Dr Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon.com.

He should know, after all contrary to popular perception, Amazon has a huge presence in the cloud. Online retail for which it is better known only forms a small part of its business overall.

In this discussion with Business Line , Dr Vogels discusses cloud standards, the speed advantage and the trade-offs between the private and the public clouds. Excerpts:

Amazon believes in the public cloud, but at the NASSCOM event this month, many CIOs mentioned that they were happier with the private cloud. What are your thoughts on this?

Most CIOs understand the private cloud, but you have to understand that when there is a paradigm shift, everybody takes time to get comfortable. This happened earlier when the mainframe era gave way to client server computing. Many CIOs have to manage anywhere between 4,000 and 5,000 applications, and not all of them may be ready for the cloud immediately; some of them may not be suitable for the cloud at all. Of course, CIOs also realise that when they opt for a private cloud, they lose the benefits of the public cloud, they still have to deal with capital, and they are still responsible for all the systems.

Is Amazon pushing the public cloud because you view cloud solely as an infrastructure? What is wrong with private clouds? After all, even if people own the infrastructure, they still get the other benefits of cloud, don't they?

We do not claim that there is anything wrong with private clouds; but you don't get the advantages of a public cloud on a private cloud. Amazon.com runs off the public cloud and has seen tremendous cost savings. CIOs are worried about the security of the cloud, but Amazon.com runs GovCloud, which powers around 100 US government agencies and the US government has said that the security that they get from Amazon is better than what they could achieve themselves.

What are your plans for India? How many clients do you have among large enterprises?

India is a very important market for us. There are many fascinating enterprises here and many of the early cloud adapters are from India. We have many customers here, like NDTV, Tata Sky and Hungama.

Regarding open standards and clouds, where do you think things stand? Are cloud standards really open?

We haven't heard about this from our customers. The way our customers see it, these are still early days and the era of standards has not come to the cloud. We are currently building features that our customers require. Eventually, standards will come. When customers indicate that standards are important, we will engage with them.

In 2009, a banking Trojan illegally used Amazon's service. What steps have you taken to ensure that there are no repeats?

The security of our customers and that of our customers' customers is very important to us. Every company that is a part of our cloud services has to obey our terms of service, which states that you cannot use our services to do anything illegal. If we find any violations, we will take action.

Amazon Fire's Silk runs half off the cloud and half off the device. What is the philosophy behind this?

Today, you find people running the same application from various devices. One way developers can optimise things is by putting most of the common code on the cloud and then put minimal code on the device. When you do that, you are leveraging the power of the cloud.

JeffBezos said in an interview that Amazon finds and corrects even the smallest defects.

Can you give an anecdotal example forAmazon Web Services?

This comes from lean manufacturing as pioneered by companies like Toyota. Toyota has a philosophy that no car with defects will leave their factory. With cloud, it is easy to fix defects. If you have millions of product installations, you have to update each individually, but with the cloud, if you have one break, you just need one fix.

He also said mentioned thatthe cloud is almost 20 times faster at accessing content than through Wi-Fi. How do you achieve such performance?

If you remember amazon.com in 1995, we had just two elements, a visual and some text. Now, there are many elements to a page and downloading them from different servers takes time. At the core of the Internet, getting information is done quickly, but by the time this information reaches you, it takes time. With the cloud, the processing of all these data elements is done very quickly, providing you with this advantage. Today's computers are fast, but Amazon's EC2 can render faster than the fastest desktop.

The final question - what next? What are your plans for AWS globally and specifically in India?

In the fullness of time, we hope to cover the whole world. But our number one priority, now and forever, will be the security of our users. India is an important market for us and while we would like to cover it over time, right now, our Indian customers are being serviced from Singapore.

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