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Introduction to Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is taking over. Demand continues to rise from both companies and consumers that rely on remote storage and computing power accessible from anywhere. Tech giants Google, Microsoft, IBM, and others are vying to be the go-to providers. But one company has remained the leader, Amazon.
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Introduction to Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a commanding lead in the cloud right now. Amazon Web Services is behind a lot of the technology we use. From calling a Lyft to checking your video doorbell to streaming your favorite shows. When people are watching a Prime movie, or a Netflix movie, or a Hulu movie, or others like that, they're watching it and streaming off of Amazon Web Services. The Super Bowl, Major League Baseball, NASCAR, and Formula One racing as well. If you use Intuit to do your taxes, that runs on AWS. AWS has been one of Amazon's most profitable business endeavors. In 2018-19, AWS generated more than $25 billion in sales. Plus, they're still growing like grass. In the first quarter of 2019, the revenue climbed to $7.7 billion, up from $5.44 billion a year earlier. Amazon has over 2.2 million customers using AWS today. They're usually big companies like Goldman Sachs or Capital One. There are over 4,000 government agencies that run on AWS.
Companies are dropping their own data centers for Amazon or other cloud providers. But moving all of that data online can be a challenge. The transfer fees for moving data over the network online can be quite high. And also, it can take a while if you have petabytes and petabytes and petabytes of data. So Amazon built physical products to make transferring large amounts of data easier. A portable data transfer device capable of operating in a war zone called Snowball. And even a giant truck called Snowmobile to help companies migrate their data to the cloud.
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So why would a company need to move to a cloud service provider like AWS? Most of AWS's customers save between 22 and 54 percent versus running all in, building their own data center, building their own networks, powering it, having people to operate it. One of the biggest reasons that people look to the cloud is not necessarily cost, but flexibility. Developers can get access to massive amounts of computing, storage, and networking resource.
AWS says it has the largest global infrastructure footprint of any cloud provider, meaning it has data centers placed in regions around the globe where there is concentrated demand. It can allow companies to tap into more server space depending on their needs. Amazon executive said that when companies have a big retail day they can use a million servers when their normal load is 40 or 50 or 60 servers. And so the ability to do that is astronomically expensive. And that's why you see the startups growing so fast on AWS because they get access to a Fortune 500 infrastructure for cents on the dollar.
Netflix, for example, has always used Amazon as its cloud provider. But for a company that wants to migrate its data to the cloud, typically a massive data transfer needs to take place. Some companies have hundreds of terabytes, petabytes, and even exabytes of data. For some perspective and how big that is, your average MP3 song is about three megabytes. A gigabyte is about 1,000 megabytes or around 300 songs. A terabyte is about 1,000 gigabytes or 300,000 songs. A petabyte is 1,000 terabytes or 300 million songs, and an exabyte is around 1,000 petabytes or 300 billion songs. A single MP3 file might take a few seconds to transfer over the internet. 300 million or billion, however, might take a while.
AWS says some of its customers spend years and years uploading data on the network. Amazon has tried to solve this problem of cost and time by creating really tough hardware, called Snowballs, to which people who operate data centers can connect their infrastructure. Make copies of the data and then send those snowballs to AWS data centers so that the data can be moved more quickly. The smallest storage Snowball AWS has is about 50 terabytes. That's 5,000 DVDs and the largest snowballs they have are between 11,000 and 14,000 DVDs depending on how they compress it. The executive in an interview explained that they work with Lab126 folks on the industrial design, their Kindle folks on the e-ink label. So imagine if you're shipping hundreds of these, you could easily put the wrong label, put them in the wrong box. That doesn't happen, it's all automated. It knows where it's going and it labels itself. Designing the Snowball to face the difficulties of transit was not an easy task since it had to be highly durable as well as less than 50 pounds.
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AWS executive added that they actually went to their shipping partners and the fulfillment center and talked to them. So from that, they have learned a really hard problem to solve that it had to be under 50 pounds. They also wanted people to be able to check it as regular luggage. And that's actually a hard design constraint, to make something as durable as that and as dense compute and storage, in under 50 pounds.
The Snowball even passed an explosives test and meets the military's requirements for being airdropped. To meet the specifications, they have to drop the Snowball from 28 feet, 80 times, on all four corners and all six sides. And then because they build it so robustly, they can also pass the DoD 901 Barge Explosive Test, where you have 83 pounds of a plastic explosive going off 20 feet from the device multiple times. Which is a tremendous percussion wave that would turn your insides to jello. Yay! If you were standing there it would kill you. And temperature-wise, it's designed for the most extreme environments. They can operate at really high temperatures, like 140 degrees ambient temperature, and really cold temperatures, like -20. And it can have unconditioned power from a generator and it'll continue to operate. For customers calmly transferring data from the safety of their office.
But in certain instances, it's proven critical when the volcano was going off in Hawaii, the USGS used the Snowballs. They had local servers and the lava was coming up on their building. And so they didn't want to lose all that extremely valuable data they've collected. They also knew the Snowballs could operate in high-temperature environments. And so they shipped the Snowballs there, downloaded the data, and shipped the Snowballs out. And so they were able to capture all that data without losing it. Oil rigs are another area they see a lot of them. Military they're very popular. So they're used in forward-deployed units. They're used on Navy ships, aircraft, in Special Ops locations all over the world.
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For cybersecurity, where they're collecting network data and reacting to it locally. There's even a six-micron dust filter option you can snap on the front. So if you're operating them in a desert, they can filter the sand out and not have the sand go into the device.
Even Hollywood has started taking advantage of Amazon's Snow family. For studio shots, they're shooting in 8K and 12K cameras now. When they're done with the shoot they actually ship the Snowball back and it uploads the data into the cloud and then they post-processing it.
There's another, paper-sell version, which is the Snowball Edge, and that's a 100 terabyte solution. Now, the interesting thing about Snowball Edge is you can actually put compute on there and actually run workloads.
AWS was the first public cloud provider to make hardware like this for data transfer, but competitors have since developed similar products. Microsoft is the number two player in the public cloud market, behind AWS. It has Data Box products that have room for 1 petabyte of data, making it larger than what Google and IBM offer today. The Google Cloud, which is behind AWS and Microsoft Azure, has transfer appliance products. Which are storage servers that you can install inside a rack in your data center. But it's not as popular as the one that AWS is offering today.
But AWS is the only company that felt like it needed to go even bigger. The snowmobile has the equivalent of 1,250 Snowballs in it. And so it's what they call it 100 petabytes truck. To put in context how much data Snowmobile can take. Let's say the typical notebook is 500 gigabytes. A 100 petabytes would be 200 million notebooks that get ingested into this Mack truck.
Digital Globe had this challenge where they had a huge amount of satellite imagery. They're one of the largest producers in the world of satellite imagery. And so it would have taken them about 10 years to upload it over the network. And they were actually the first customer of AWS that called them and said, hey, can't you just send a truck? And so they built one. The truck has power and network fiber that will connect to the data center. Fill it up, and then the truck will come back, but the trailer back on the truck, and they'll move it back to AWS. If you think about the idea of moving an exabyte of data, if you basically assign a 10 gigabit per the second line to it, which is pretty reasonable, it would take you about 26 years. Using 10 Snowmobiles, it would take you a little less than six months. AWS announced the Snowmobile by driving it onto a stage at an AWS event and people went crazy. How could a cloud be a truck?. It was innovative.
People are not able to see the inside of the truck because the technology is safely guarded, but it's essentially a data center on wheels. Snowmobile uses what Amazon calls Zero-G racks, which suspend the system from both the top and the bottom of the truck to handle the impacts while in motion. And it has its own power and cooling. Once the transfer is complete, the truck enters transport mode. An armed guard and an escort accompany the truck as it returns to Amazon's data centers for the upload. Its location is monitored over cellular and satellite communications throughout the entire journey. Amazon intentionally left the truck devoid of branding to keep it discreet. When it connects to the AWS ingestion center. The data is decrypted and hashed.
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Just as Amazon has disrupted retail with its e-commerce business, Snow products are an example of how the company has become a force to count within the cloud computing industry as well. They're continually first with features. They're first with different ways of doing things, like networking. They have the most computing variation. They have the widest range of machine learning offerings.
In 2019, they deployed 1,954 new products and services. So innovation and security have been key points for them. Their systems are the only cloud that's certified to run the intelligence agencies and DoD-type clouds, top-secret compartmented level of certification.
The executive further added that they'll continue to have just a wide variety with the most number of databases available to customers. The most robust storage platforms, the most number of options and compute. In addition to that, they've just been doing it longer than anybody else. So they have years and years of operational excellence and experience behind them.
Source: CNBC, Amazon executives' interview, and other trusted research agencies.
