I was fortunate to be invited to attend an Amazon AWS seminar today called the 101 Cloud Computing Seminar about the services Amazon provides in the cloud.
While I’ve been a long time user of Amazon’s S3 Simple Storage Service, I have not really payed much attention to the other services it offers.
Simone Brunozzi, an Amazon Technology Evangelist, ran the seminar and he did a great job selling the service and its potential for businesses both large and small. Over the years I’ve been to a lot of seminars, courses and talks and he was among the best speakers I’ve come across as he was really engaging and obviously knew what he was talking about.
The only thing that left me a little worried was about the legal ramifications of having sensitive data hosted on overseas servers. A couple of questions on this were asked but there seemed to be no solid answers on Amazon’s commitment to protecting its customers data. That’s was and is a bit of a worry but in the online world much of our data is hosted in different countries.
Amazon AWS offers a range of services in the areas of computing, content delivery, deployment, e-commerce, messaging, monitoring, networking, payments, storage and workforce.
Some of the key reasons I have and will continue to use Amazon services is that they:
- Pricing: They only charge you for what you actually use.
- Redundancy: They offer increased redundancy if you spread your data over multiple regions.
- Scalability: Their services can expand rapidly according to your needs.
- Security: They spend a lot of money and time to make sure they have a secure network.
I’m looking forward to using more of the Amazon AWS services over the coming months. While I now use other services for content delivery, messaging and web hosting, I hope to test out Amazon’s versions to see if they can simplify my workflow.
After listening to Simone talking about the services, I’m becoming even more comfortable in entrusting my data and hosting to Amazon. Amazon is far more likely to have the infrastructure and security in place to exceed any type of computing requirement I’m ever likely to need and requires little in the way of knowledge or upfront cost from me.
Over the past few months I’ve had some really poor experiences shopping with Amazon but have also had some of the best customer service experiences as well. I have enough faith in them as a company to believe that they will do their utmost to protect my data and my business.
I would encourage everyone to have a read of Simone’s blog post about how he got hired by Amazon as it says a lot about how serious Amazon are about getting the best candidate for their important roles and about how hard Simone has had to work for the great position he has.
