アマゾン・ウェブ・サービス(AWS)はアマゾン(AMZN)が提供するクラウドコンピューティングサービスです。
先日の「YUTAの米国株投資」さんで取り上げられていたクラウドサービス事情を読んで,AWSはパブリック・クラウド分野では先行しており,この状態をキープできればネットワーク効果によりますます強固なモートを形成することが可能だと判断しています。長期的な推移を見守っていきたいと思います。
さて,アマゾンのJames Hamilton氏のサイトに「イノベーションの10年(A Decade of Innovation)」という記事が投稿されていたので一部抜粋して紹介します。ちなみに,James Hamilton氏は元々は一般のユーザーとしてアマゾンのコミュニティーに関わっており,その後,アマゾンに転職してAWSの開発を行うようになったという経歴の持ち主です。クラウドコンピューティングの短い歴史をうまくまとめてくれています。
March 14, 2006 was the beginning of a new era in computing. That was the day that Amazon Web Services released the Simple Storage Service (S3). Technically, Simple Queuing Services was released earlier but it was the release of S3 that really lit the fire under cloud computing. I remember that day well. At the time I was General Manager of Frontbridge Technologies, a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft that provided cloud hosted email antispam, antimalware, and archiving services. From this experience, I felt like I understood the customer value of cloud hosted services. I knew customers loved the speed of provisioning and low cost so, in many ways, I was already a convert. I already felt pretty sure that cloud hosting was the future.
2006年3月14日にコンピューティングの新しい時代が幕を開けました。その日はアマゾン・ウェブ・サービス(AWS)がシンプル・ストレージ・サービス(S3)を発表した日です。S3の発表はクラウドコンピューティング分野に火をつけました。
その日のことはよく覚えています。私(James Hamilton氏)はマイクロソフトの完全子会社であるFrontbridge Technologiesのジェネラル・マネージャーでした。Frontbridgeはクラウド上でE-mailスパム対策やマルウェア対策,データ保存サービスなどを提供していました。そうした経験から,クラウドサービスの顧客価値を理解していました。
顧客は高速で低コストに提供されるクラウドリソースを気に入っていました。いろんな意味で私はすでに改宗者(クラウド信者)でした。クラウド・サービスに大きな未来があることを確信していたのです。
But still the Amazon Simple Storage Service announcement was an eye opener for me. The technology industry has 100s of announcements each day and I don’t look at many. For the most part, they are uninteresting. But the S3 announcement was game changing. Most startling was the cost of the service. It was nearly 2 orders of magnitude less expensive than we were currently paying for multi-data center redundant storage. But what was even more disruptive was a credit card was all that was needed to provision storage. There was no required proposal for financial approval, there was no RFP, no vendor selection process, no vendor negotiation, and no data center space need be found. I could just sign up and start working.
しかし,それでもアマゾンのS3の発表には驚かされました。テクノロジー業界は毎日数百もの新発表があり,その大半は大して面白くもありません。しかし,S3の発表は革新的(Game Changing)でした。最も驚かされたのはサービスのコストです。それまでマルチ・データセンターに対して払っていた値段よりも二桁も安かったからです。
※アマゾンは後発ながら圧倒的な価格破壊戦略を持ってクラウドコンピューティング分野に乗り込んできたことがわかります。ジェフ・ベゾスお得意の「損益分岐点を変えて体力勝負に持ち込む」の成功例です。
しかし,さらに破壊的だったのは,クレジットカード一つでストレージを借りることができることでした。財務チェック,システム提案書,ベンダー選定書,データセンターのスペースといったものが何一ついらなかったのです。ただ,サインアップするだけで使い始めることができました。
※アマゾンは無駄の排除に関しては徹底しており得意分野です。顧客に手間がかからず,安くサービスを提供するということは,流通業界でもすでにおなじみですが,既存のベンダーであるオラクル(ORCL)やIBM(IBM)からすると脅威な存在だったと思います。実際,その後アマゾンに続いて各社,クラウドサービスに本腰を入れています。
What was at least as notable as the low cost and ease of provisioning was that the announcement came from Amazon rather than a traditional enterprise IT player. Rather than a company that is dedicated to high margins, difficult negotiations, and sometimes even license usage audits, this service came from Amazon. What looks to be “large” margins at Amazon would have shareholders at most enterprise IT companies calling for immediate management change. This really was different. A different supplier, a different model, a low friction provisioning path, and a fundamentally different price that starts low and falls rather than escalates over time.
伝統的なIT企業ではなく,アマゾンからこうした低コストで便利なクラウド・リソースが提供されたことについてはあまり驚きませんでした。高マージンで,価格を値切らない,ライセンスの使用状況について監査してくるような企業ではなく,(部外者の)アマゾンからS3サービスは生まれました。
多くのIT企業の株主はすぐにやり方を変えるようにと会社に訴えました。これは難しい問題でした。サプライヤーも違えば,ビジネスモデルも違う企業が根本的に違う価格で戦うわけですから。それも,時間をかけてじわじわと価格が下落するのではなく,暴落したわけですから。
The S3 announcement generated industry-wide interest and wonderment on how it would be possible, for even a very high volume supplier, to not lose money on every single byte sold. I was completely captivated by the offering and ended up writing several thousand lines of code using S3 as the underlying storage system. At times it was a bit clunky, there was the odd sharp edge, but writing the app really established in my mind that this was the beginning of something big.
S3の発表は業界全体で注目され,いったいどうやってそんなことが可能なのかといぶかしがりました。私はアマゾンのオファーに完全に魅了され,S3を使って数千行のコードを書くようになりました。S3は使いにくいこともありましたが,アプリを書いているうちに「これは何かとてつもなくでかいことの始まりだ」と思うようになりました。
From deciding to write the app to it being up and running was measured in days and, after debugging and testing extensively, the end of the month rolled around and I got my Visa bill. Of course, I knew abstractly that S3 was disruptively priced but when I saw that my bill for the entire development and test of this application was $3.08, it just seemed wrong. Once development was complete I was still storing all the test data in S3 so the following month I got a bill for $0.07.
アプリをデバッグしたりテストしたりしているうちに月末になり,Visaカードの請求書が来ました。もちろん,S3はべらぼうに安い価格なのは漠然とは知っていました。しかし,請求書を見たところ,開発およびテストの分のコストはたったの$3.08。何かの間違いだと思いました。
さらに開発が終わってその翌月もS3にテストデータをおいていましたが,その請求額もたったの$0.07でした。
This was so game changing that wrote it up, blogged it internally where I worked, and demoed it to company leadership including the CTO and CEO. My presentation included a picture of Al Vermeulen, one of the early developers on S3, showed some of how S3 worked and, to underline my point that this really was different, I included my two AWS bills. My key point was this wasn’t just a stunt or a fun little experiment by Amazon but was really a fundamental new way of delivering infrastructure services. Storage was first but compute was to follow shortly.
S3の価格破壊は業界を一変させる出来事であり,社内でCTOやCEOなどの幹部にも伝えました。私が伝えたかったのは,アマゾンが根本的に新しい方法でインフラサービスを提供しているということでした。ストレージが最初のサービスでしたが,すぐ後にはコンピューティングサービスも追随しました。
I got increasingly interested in AWS and by 2007 was attending user group meetings, doing presentations at Amazon, and eventually I just gave up and joined the team in late 2008.
私はますますAWSに興味を持ち,2007までにユーザーグループに参加するようになり,最終的には2008年末にアマゾンに加わりました。
As a member of the AWS engineering team, my first impressions are probably best summarized as fast. Decisions are made quickly. New ideas end up in code and available to customers at a speed that just makes the pace of enterprise IT look like continental drift. In a previous role, I remember (half) jokingly saying “we ship twice a decade whether customers need it or not.” Now new features are going out so frequently they are often hard to track.
AWSエンジニアリングチームのメンバーとして最初に感じたのは「速い」ということでした。決断はすぐにくだされ,新しいアイデアはすぐに実装され,顧客に提供されるのです。その速度といったら,ほかのIT企業は大陸移動(遅々として動いているように見えない)でもしているかのようでした。前職では,半分冗談交じりでこう言ったのを覚えています。「顧客が必要としているかどうかにかかわらず,5年に一度新製品を出荷する」いまや新しい機能は頻繁に更新され,ついて行くのも難しいほどでした。
Another interesting aspect of AWS is how product or engineering debates are handled. These arguments come up frequently and are as actively debated at AWS as at any company. These decisions might even be argued with more fervor and conviction at AWS but its data that closes the debates and decisions are made remarkably quickly. At AWS instead of having a “strategy” and convincing customers that is what they really need, we deliver features we find useful ourselves and we invest quickly in services that customers adopt broadly. Good services become great services fast.
もう一つのAWSの面白い側面は,製品や技術的な議論がどうやって行われるかでした。議論のテーマはどんどん湧いてきて,どの会社よりも議論が活発でした。白熱した議論は驚くほど素早く結論にいたり,議論の決着をつけるのはAWSのデータでした。AWSでは,「戦略」を持つのではなく,顧客が本当に必要としていることを明らかにし,自分たちにとって便利だと思う機能を提供し,顧客が広く受け入れてくれるようなサービスを提供します。よいサービスが,すぐにすばらしいサービスになりました。
※戦略とは仮説に基づいた物事の進め方のことだと思いますが,AWSでは仮説→検証のプロセスをきわめて高速で回しているのだと思います。また,AWSエンジニア自身もユーザー目線を持っていることが特徴的です。
In some of my past roles, I’ve seen these healthy debates become bigger than life and end up dragging on unproductively for years. At AWS they are resolved in days with customer usage data and the focus swings quickly to execution. It’s really refreshing to have the normal debate to delivery equation turned upside down. Most of the effort at AWS ends up in customer hands whereas, at many jobs I’ve held, much of the effort is in bringing these competing internal efforts to resolution. The AWS speed of delivery is great for customers and I find it an exciting environment for engineers.
前職では,健全な議論がだんだんと大きくなり,何年にもわたって非生産的にだらだらと続けられるのを見てきました。AWSでは,顧客の使用データをもとに数日で問題を解決し,すぐに実行に移されます。AWSのサービス提供のスピードは顧客にとってすばらしいものであり,エンジニアとしてもエキサイティングな環境だと感じています。
The best proof of innovation is customer commitment and, without a doubt, the highest form of customer commitment is to decide to run the entire company on cloud infrastructure. Netflix was the first to publically make the decision to go 100% cloud. Some of my favorite examples of cloud “all in” corporate commitments:
AWSのイノベーションのすばらしさを証明するには,顧客が気に入ってくれていることを示すのが一番でしょう。以下の企業は,すべてのサービスをアマゾン・クラウド・インフラストラクチャー上で動かしています。Netflixが100%クラウドに移行した最初の企業でした。
- 2010 Netflix
- 2013 Kempinski Hotels
- 2013 Suncorp Group
- 2014 Infor
- 2014 Nippon Express
- 2014 Notre Dame University
- 2014 National Democratic Institute
- 2015 The Guardian Media Group
From my perspective, the companies that have decided to go with cloud only infrastructure are the most interesting and the most compelling examples of the massive change sweeping the industry. But, as an example of the AWS speed of innovation, check out some of the highlights over the last decade:
私から見るとインフラをクラウドオンリーにすることを決断した企業は,最もおもしろく業界が激変していることを表してくれている好例だと思います。ここで,AWSのここ10年のイノベーションの速度を示すハイライトを紹介します。
2006
- 2006 Amazon S3
- 2006 Amazon SQS
- 2006 Amazon EC2
2007
- 2007 AWS introduces commerce platform for AWS, rapidly accelerating adoption, Amazon FPS
- 2007 Amazon S3 in EMEA
- 2007 Amazon Simple DB
2008
- 2008 pricing plan for Amazon SQS and new WSDL (1st price drop)
- 2008 Elastic IP Addresses
- 2008 Availability Zones for EC2
- 2008 AWS adds Premium (enterprise) support
- 2008 AWS Lowers Data Transfer Costs
- 2008 Amazon Elastic Block Storage
- 2008 EC2 SLA and GA, EC2 for Windows, EC2 for SQL Server
- 2008 New Tiered Pricing for Amazon S3
- 2008 Amazon CloudFront
- 2008 EC2 in Europe (Ireland)
2009
- 2009 AWS Management Console
- 2009 New lower pricing tiers for Amazon CloudFront
- 2009 Amazon FPS
- 2009 Elastic MapReduce
- May 2009 Elastic Load Balancing,
- May 2009 Amazon Autoscaling
- May 2009 Amazon CloudWatch
- 2009 AWS Virtual Private Clou
- 2009 New lower prices for Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances
- 2009 New lower prices for Windows instances with authentication services
- 2009 AWS enters the database market with Amazon Relational Database Service
- 2009 Lower Amazon EC2 on demand pricing
- 2009 EC2 Spot Instances
- Dec 2009 AWS S3 Pricing reductions, Free Inbound Data Transfer until 6/30/2010
- 2009 Amazon CloudFront Streaming
- 2009 AWS US West Region
2010
- 2010 Lower Pricing for Outbound Data Transfer
- 2010 AWS launches first region in Asia Pacific (Singapore)
- 2010 Amazon SNS
- May 2010 Multi Availability Zones for RDS
- May 2010 Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage
- 2010 AWS Import/Export
- 2010 Amazon CloudFront adds HTTPS Support, lowers prices, Opens NYC edge location
- 2010 Cluster Compute Instances for EC2
- 2010 AWS Identity and Access Management
- 2010 Oracle certifies enterprise software on AWS
- 2010 New lower prices for High Memory Double and Quadruple XL instances\
- 2010 Read Replicas, Lower High Memory DB Memory Instance Prices for Amazon RDS
- 2010 Amazon S3 lowers storage prices
- 2010 Amazon Route 53
- 2010 Mobile SDKs for AWS
2011
- 2011 Amazon SES
- 2011 AWS New Premium Support Plans, Lowers usage prices by 50% on existing plans
- 2011 AWS Elastic Beanstalk
- 2011 AWS CloudFormation
- 2011 AWS Tokyo Region
- May 2011 SAP certifies enterprise software on AWS
- May 2011 Amazon CloudWatch custom metrics, lower prices for Amazon EC2 monitoring
- 2011 AWS new Data Transfer Pricing
- Aug 2011 Amazon ElastiCache
- Aug 2011 AWS enables enterprises to connect their data centers directly to AWS via AWS Direct Connect
- Aug 2011 AWS launches Region dedicated to US Government Agencies and Contractors (AWS GovCloud)
- 2011 AWS Route53 lowers pricing for hosted zones
- 2011 AWS US West Region (Oregon) 100% Carbon Free Power
- 2011AWS enters South America with region in Sao Paulo, Brazil
- 2011 Amazon Elastic MapReduce support for cc2.8xlarge and reduced pricing for cc1.4xlarge
2012
- 2012 AWS Storage Gateway
- 2012 Dynamo DB
- 2012 Amazon SWF
- 2012 Amazon S3 lowers prices for standard storage
- March 2012 New lower pricing for Amazon EC2, RDS and ElastiCache
- April 2012 Amazon CloudSearch
- 2012AWS Marketplace for third-party selling of applications to businesses
- 2012 AWS Support Expands Free Tier, Adds Features, Lowers Prices
- 2012 AWS Sydney Region
- July 2012 EC2 High I/O Instances
- 2012 Amazon Glacier
- 2012 EBS Provisioned IOPs Announced
- 2012 Second Gen Standard Instances for Amazon EC2 and a price reduction for M1 Instances
- 2012 More than 6K attend first AWS user conference, re:Invent
- 2012 AWS announces Amazon RedShift
- 2012 Amazon CloudSearch free trial program and price reduction
- 2012 Amazon RDS and Amazon ElastiCache Lower Prices
- 2012 Amazon S3 Lower prices for Standard Storage and RRS
- 2012 AWS Data Pipeline
2013
- 2013 Amazon Elastic Transcoder
- 2013 High Memory Cluster Instances
- 2013 EC2 Price Reduction, global expansion of M3 Standard Instances, reduced data transfer pricing
- 2013 AWS OpsWorks
- 2013 IBM protest reveals that AWS won $600M cloud contract with CIA
- 2013 Amazon RDS reduces price of Multi-AZ Deployments
- 2013 Amazon SQS and SNS lower prices and expand free tiers – 50% price drop for SQS
- 2013 AWS CloudHSM
- 2013 AWS introduces global developer training and certification program
- 2013 Lower prices on Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances, Amazon DB
- 2013 AWS lowers prices for Amazon S3 request pricing, Windows on-demand EC2 instances by up to 26%
- May 2013 AWS first major cloud provider to gain FedRAMP certification
- 2013 AWS lowers prices of on-demand and reserved RDS instances by up to 28%
- July 2013 AWS price reductions on EC2 dedicated instances
- 2013 AWS Gartner estimates that AWS customers are deploying 5x more infrastructure on AWS than the combined adoption of the next 14 providers
- 2013 Amazon AppStream launched
- 2013 Amazon WorkSpaces launched
- 2013 EC2 GPU Instances
- 2013 price reduction for M3 Instances
- 2013 – Amazon introduces Amazon Kinesis
- 2013 Amazon EC2 HI1 Instance price reduction and Spot availability
- 2013 Amazon China Region
2014
- 2014 New Amazon EC2 M3 Instance Sizes and Lower Prices for Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS
- 2014 AWS Storage Gateway price reduction
- 2014 Amazon Redshift new SSD-based node type
- 2014 General availability for Amazon AppStream and Amazon WorkSpaces
- 2014 AWS price reduction EC2, RDS, S3, ElastiCache, and Elastic MapReduce (price reduction #42)
- 2014 AWS receives Department of Defense-Wide provisional authorization for all U.S. Regions
- 2014 Availability of R3 instances
- May 2014 Launch of AWS Management Portal for vCenter
- May 2014 Introducing Amazon EBS encryption
- 2014 AWS availability of a new SSD-backed volume type for Amazon EBS (price drop #43)
- 2014 AWS Opened Pop-up Loft in San Francisco on temporary basis
- 2014 Amazon Redshift free trial and price reductions in Asia Pacific (price drop #44)
- 2014 new low-cost general purpose instance type for Amazon EC2
- 2014 Introduction of Amazon Zocalo (now known as Amazon WorkDocs)
- 2014 Route 53 price reduction (price drop #45)
- 2014 Introduction of services for mobile developers: Amazon Cognito, Amazon Mobile Analytics, AWS Mobile SDK, and Amazon SNS Mobile Push
- 2014 Launched Amazon CloudWatch logs
- 2014 AWS GovCloud achieves Department of Defense CSM Level 3-5 Provisional Authorization
- 2014 General availability of Zocalo (now known as Amazon WorkDocs)
- 2014 AWS EU (Frankfurt) region
- 2014 AWS Reopened Pop-up Loft in San Francisco on permanent basis
- 2014 Introduction of native support for document models like JSON into DynamoDB
- 2014 Introduction of AWS Directory Service
- 2014 AWS achieves ISO- 9001 certification
- 2014 Expansion of APN Partner benefits, introduction of new Managed Service and SaaS Partner Programs, and expansion of APN Partner training
- 2014 CloudSearch price drop (price drop #46)
- 2014 Introduction of Amazon Aurora, a MySQL-compatible database
- 2014 Enterprise security & governance services: Key Management, AWS Config, & AWS Service Catalog
- 2014 New application lifecycle management services introduced: AWS CodeDeploy & AWS CodePipeline
- 2014 Amazon EC2 Container Service introduced
- 2014 AWS Lambda announced
- 2014 Amazon EC2 C4 and EBS pre-announced
- 2014 AWS pledges long-term commitment to achieve 100 percent renewable-energy usage
- 2014 Data transfer and CloudFront price drop (price drop #47)
2015
- 2015 Amazon Wind Farm Fowler Ridge Announced
- 2015 Amazon WorkMail launches in preview
- 2015 Amazon Machine Learning, fully managed service announced
- 2015 AWS Marketplace for Desktop Apps and Amazon WorkSpaces Application Manager
- 2015 ISVs Go “All-In” with AWS announcement: MicroStrategy, Software AG, TIBCO, and Onshape
- May 2015 AWS Educate to Accelerate Cloud Learning in the Classroom
- 2015 Amazon Solar Farm US East Announced
- 2015 M4 Instances for Amazon EC2
- 2015 AWS Opens Second Global “City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge”
- 2015 AWS 2016 India region pre-announced
- 2015 AWS Opened Pop-up Loft in New York City
- 2015 ISVs Go “All-In” with AWS announcement: Looker, Qlik, Sumo Logic, and Works Applications.
- 2015 AWS Announces Amazon API Gateway
- 2015 AWS Announces AWS Device Farm
- 2015 Amazon Wind Farm US East Announced
- 2015 Amazon Aurora General Availability
- 2015 AWS Announced Pop-up Lofts opening in London and Berlin
- 2015 AWS Announced Amazon QuickSight at re:Invent
- 2015 AWS Announced AWS Snowball and Amazon Kinesis Firehose at re:Invent
- 2015 AWS Announced AWS Database Migration Service and Amazon RDS for MariaDB at re:Invent
- 2015 AWS and Accenture Announce the Accenture AWS Business Group
- 2015 AWS Announced AWS IoT preview at re:Invent
- 2015 AWS Pre-Announced the AWS UK region to be third in the European Union
- 2015 Amazon Wind Farm US Central Announced
- 2015 AWS Announced IoT General Availability
- 2015 AWS Introduced t2.nano, the smallest and lowest cost Amazon Ec2 instance
2016
- 2016 AWS launched Korea region as fifth in Asia Pacific (Seoul)
- 2016 Amazon WorkMail General Availability
- 2015 AWS pre-announced Canada-Montreal region
- 2016 AWS Announced Amazon Lumberyard and Amazon GameLift Availability for Game Developers
- 2016 AWS Announced the AWS Pop-up Loft in Tel Aviv