Amazon's Cloud Evangelist

Werner Vogels left a post at Cornell University to come work as Amazon.com’s chief technologist, giving the online retailer a competitive edge in “cloud computing.”

On a cool spring afternoon in New York City, Werner Vogels ascends the stage in a packed ballroom at the Roosevelt Hotel on Madison Avenue. Hundreds of business and technology executives have come to hear Amazon.com’s chief technology officer talk about cloud computing, the computer services phenomenon that’s thriving even as much of the technology industry struggles through the economic downturn. Vogels is high-tech’s leading guru on “the cloud,” and he’s here to explain why the computer industry will never be the same.

For the next hour, Vogels lays out what’s new and different about cloud computing, including Amazon’s popular cloud offering, Amazon Web Services. Cloud computing blends the ease and pervasiveness of the Web with the computational power of large, modern data centers, in an architectural shift that business managers and technology professionals have yet to get their arms around. “It’s still day one,” Amazon’s towering, whiskered CTO tells the audience.

Customers that sign up for Amazon Web Services can order servers, storage and other computer infrastructure on demand, be billed for what they consume in one-minute increments and then charge the fees to a credit card. It’s a fast and flexible alternative to deploying new computers and other equipment in corporate data centers, and, in many cases, it’s cheaper, too. For budget-constrained IT departments, Vogels explains, cloud services are a way to translate fixed costs into variable expenses, or, as the folks at Amazon like to say, shift “cap ex” to “op ex.”

IT consultant Gartner Inc. estimates the cloud computing market generated $46 billion in revenue last year and is on track to hit $150 billion by 2013, a 21 percent annual growth rate. In what feels like a land rush, Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, and other leading computer and Web companies are jumping into the market. Amazon has established itself as the early leader, with a half-million developers subscribing to Amazon Web Services and an impressive list of business customers that includes Eli Lilly, NASDAQ and The New York Times. Just as significantly, a who’s who of the software industry—IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems—has begun offering products through Amazon Web Services, thrusting Amazon into the middle of the computer industry’s hottest trend.

Just what is cloud computing? “It’s hard to find a complete definition,” Vogels admits. He defines it as “massively scalable IT” that’s provided over the internet as on-demand services. Not only that, but customers pay for what they use and nothing more. And, unlike corporate data centers, the cloud is used and accessed by many individuals and organizations, not a single business. In its simplest form, cloud computing can simply mean storing company documents online via Amazon or Google, rather than in the company’s own server room. More expansively, a large variety of business functions from customer relationship management to sales to database management can be outsourced to the “cloud.”

For those reasons, cloud computing has made it easy for startups and small companies to deploy a wide range of applications without the up-front investment in on-premises systems that would otherwise be required. Vogels points to Animoto, which lets customers convert photos into nicely-produced videos, as an example. Animoto runs its business on Amazon Web Services, and when the company struck a deal to integrate its service with Facebook, a huge traffic spike followed as 25,000 users per hour accessed Animoto’s website. Within a few days, Animoto’s systems requirement escalated from 50 servers to more than 3,500 servers. Meeting that demand would have been virtually impossible without Amazon’s cloud.

Cloud computing represents an important new revenue stream for Amazon, though just how much isn’t known. Amazon lumps Amazon Web Services sales into its non-retail “other” category along with its Enterprise Solutions Web hosting business and co-branded credit cards. In 2008, revenues from “other” operations totaled $542 million. That’s only 2.8 percent of Amazon’s $19.2 billion in total sales last year, but here’s the cause for optimism. While Amazon’s overall business grew 29 percent in 2008, revenue from its “other” operations jumped 42 percent, fueled in part by Amazon Web Services.

The easy-going Vogels has become Amazon’s front man for cloud computing because he’s fluent in the distributed systems that serve as the foundation for cloud services. A native of The Netherlands, Vogels came to Amazon five years ago from Cornell University, where he experimented with network protocols, computer cluster design and other guts of distributed systems as a researcher in the computer science department. Today, the 50-year-old Vogels and his wife live in Bellevue. When not in the office or on the speaking circuit, he’s often riding around town on his motorcycle.

With a doctorate in computer science from Vrije University in Amsterdam, Vogels can talk shop with the software coders who tend to be the hands-on practitioners of cloud computing. He’s equally comfortable with tech managers, CIOs and other top management, which explains why he’s on the road so much these days. Vogels describes himself as an “external-facing technologist,” essentially a software engineer and strategist (although much more than that) whose job also includes interacting with Amazon’s partners, customers and the public. Last year, InformationWeek magazine named Vogels its “chief of the year,” citing his role not just as a cloud computing evangelist, but also as a highly engaged advocate for Amazon’s customers in the process.

It was at Cornell that Vogels made a name for himself among techies who specialize in large scale computer systems of the kind used by national laboratories for research and by major corporations to run their businesses. On his “All Things Distributed” blog, Vogels wrote not just about terabytes and bandwidth, but also about music, travel and other aspects of his personal life, including his reasons for taking a job with Amazon rather than Microsoft.

“I chose to come to Amazon because of the customer focus that drives everything the company does,” he now explains. “The challenge was also very interesting. Systems at Amazon need to be operated at mega-scale in ultra-reliable fashion, which required Amazon to develop dedicated technologies that had not been built before.”

Microsoft’s loss was Amazon’s gain. Since relocating to Seattle, Vogels has helped Amazon design and scale its IT infrastructure to handle workloads many times its own. The seed for Amazon Web Services was planted almost 10 years ago when the company decided to “decouple” system components in its data center so that other e-commerce companies could sell Amazon products on their own websites. As the number of companies taking advantage of that program approached and exceeded 1 million, the application’s programming interfaces through which customers made use of its technology grew increasingly important.

In 2004, Amazon introduced its first cloud offering, a message-delivering capability for applications called Simple Queue Service. It was the first of many Amazon infrastructure components available as a service. Within two years, Amazon initiated its Simple Storage Service and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) foundational pieces of Amazon Web Services. During the past 12 months, Amazon has stepped up the rollout, introducing block storage, elastic IP addresses, EC2 availability zones in the United States and Europe, integration with Facebook.com and Salesforce.com, and a content delivery network called CloudFront.

The many elements of Amazon Web Services combine to give other companies “the same scalability, reliability, performance and cost-effectiveness” that Amazon gets from its systems, Vogels says.

Of course, it’s all more than one person can manage on his own. Vogels works closely with the marketing and customer-support teams at Amazon Web Services, and he uses social networking and other Web 2.0 technologies to engage the ever-expanding base of cloud developers and users. He continues to write on his blog, and more than 5,000 people follow him on Twitter. “I use many social networking tools because they extend my ability to further understand our customer’s needs and, along with many others at AWS, communicate those needs back to the teams working on the services,” he says.

Within hours of his presentation in New York, Vogels is on his way to the airport. The destination this time is San Francisco, where he has another speaking engagement. Upon his arrival in the Bay Area, Vogels makes a Twitter post at 1:54 a.m.: “Enjoying the calm and serenity of the Palo Alto Four Seasons. What a change from New York City and the Roosevelt.”

It’s a rare reprieve for Amazon’s CTO. With cloud computing booming, and Amazon in the thick of it, he will soon be in front of another crowd, explaining what it’s all about.