Incremental progress to declare victory is a phrase often heard in the technology industry, but far more rarely practiced. Too often we see vendors polishing their swords to slivers, having failed to learn the basic lesson that perfect is the enemy of good.
Not so the folks from Amazon Web Services. Besides their early identification of and commitment to the market for cloud based services, their building block approach to their web services business is one I believe many vendors could learn from.
Consider that when EC2 and S3 were launched, they were almost elemental building blocks which – while offering the elastic and pay-as-you-go benefits that have since come to characterize the cloud – required considerable investment in time and skills before they could be properly leveraged. Many vendors would have been horrified at the prospect of launching a product that could be characterized as unfinished; Amazon just made it available and set to improving it incrementally.
In the days since, we’ve seen the introduction of new services like DevPay of Flexible Payment Service as well as tweaks of the economic model (reserved instances), the persistence (elastic block store), the tooling (the Eclipse toolkit), the management (the management console), the service level reporting (service health dashboard), the platform capabilities (monitoring, auto-scaling and elastic load balancing) and most recently the data portability (AWS Import/Export).
None of which is to say that Amazon Web Services are perfect. Folks I know complain of the performance with file volumes numbering in the millions, the tooling story still has a long way to go to match Azure and Visual Studio’s ability to localize cloud development, and so on.
The point is that rather than get hung up on the existing shortfalls, Amazon is releasing early and often while working in the background to improve the service. My guess is that they’ll tackle the tooling and performance issues as they do everything else: incrementally.
Either way, it seems like Jeff Bezos’ “risky bet” is looking better by the day.
Disclosure: Amazon is not a RedMonk customer, but RedMonk is an Amazon customer.
