Jeff Bezos took the stage here at Web 2.0 Expo yesterday, followed by a conversation with Tim O’Reilly.
Bezos was talking about the current state and future vision for Amazon Web Services. He said that basically Amazon wants to give web applications developers of the world the tools they need to be able to leave the server operations part of their business to Amazon, and focus on the development and building of their business – adding that over the course of 13 years Amazon had gotten “quite good at it”. Knowing by heart how all involving this part of operations can get as soon as an application sees significant traffic I buy into this easily.
Bezos refrained from answering many of O’Reilly’s questions. One of them about what new web services Amazon had coming. It’s an interesting question – and I immediately started guessing.
Let’s first see what they have in the field:
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Simple Queue Service (SQS): A highly scalable message queue.
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Mechanical Turk: A way to integrate humans into your applications. (I bet Bezos read this blog post when coming up with it :))
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Simple Storage Service (S3): A massive file storage service.
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Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): Servers on demand, rented by the computing hour.
Additionally they have several E-commerce services related to their retail business and Amazon’s Alexa also has some web services available, but these services are really a part of another business strategy.
So, looking at the above, I can immediately guess a few likely upcoming services:
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Database Service: A web service wrapping the operations of large scale databases into a simple API, hiding all the complexities of clustering, redundancy, replication and backup from the blissfully ignorant developers. Could be interesting to see this as a RDF datastore, but that’s probably premature or at least something to include in a separate service for the time being.
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Authentication and payment services: It’s something that Amazon is really good at, it makes perfect sense to give the rest of us access for a fee. This could potentially take a serious stab at PayPal. Note to Bezos: Use OpenID.
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Web application framework: Wrapping EC2 in at a higher level would make sense. With the current solution, deciding when to spawn new servers and so on is still left to the developer. An application framework could relief this burden and once again let the developer focus solely on the application itself.
Anyone out there have further ideas?