It’s an Amazon day

February 22, 2007 By

OK, if I were an investor I’d be thinking of buying some Amazon stock.

So far today I’ve interviewed three startups and two of them say they are using Amazon’s S3 Web services (JamGlue, a music mashup service, and TeamDirection, a project management software both use it — these two services could not be more different). It’s not just today I’ve noticed this trend, either. Amazon is getting GREAT love in startup land for making it easy to build services on top of the S3 storage service. Every entrepreneur who has decided on Amazon RAVES about the service.

It’s amazing to me that Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google are letting Amazon get such a huge lead here. These companies will never switch off of this infrastructure if Amazon keeps delivering this level of service. It lets these companies startup for very little money, and provide services that are very advanced. It’s like owning your own data center without the headache of buying new servers as your startup expands.

Oh, and I’m really bummed I missed yesterday’s Photowalking in San Francisco (Eddie took my place). The photos that Thomas Hawk got are stunning. Some of thsoe photos are hosted on SmugMug (the CEO and team showed up) which are, you guessed it, hosted on Amazon’s S3 service.

Gotta run, another interview coming up.

Oh, and what did Amazon show me this morning? I can’t tell, but it was surprising. Can’t wait to talk about it. Damn NDAs.

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  • We are also using Amazon S3 and EC2 with Zooomr. Amazon does a really good job here and it made a ton of sense for us, particularly as it applies to scalability in the future.
  • I totally agree. All the smart developments are levering S3 for storage - its cheaper and simpler. for my own personal use, JungleDisk and S3 back up 'my documents' every night. Its smart enough to recognise incremental change, and only takes a few minutes. My monthly bill is like this - Thats $1.28 for Feb to date, for 5.7 Gigs:

    Amazon Simple Storage Service Feb to date $0.20 per GB of data transferred 1.023 GB 0.21 $0.15 per GB-Month of storage 5.688 GB-Mo
    0.86 1.07
  • blogger@wordpress
    "Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google are letting Amazon get such a huge lead here"

    This isn't a 'first time' thing in the tech world. Big guys always let the not-so-big guys establish a business model. Given their deep pockets and resources, its always easy to jump in and cash out when something's hot.
  • Sreekanth
    I am wondering if we can use this service to backup my personal photos.
  • I am not sure it's about under utilised capacity, but about being able to ramp capacity linearly. It may be low margin, but Amazon are going to own this niche. No-one else seems to be offering anything close.

    I recently completed development of an app that required massive scalability. Scalability is pretty much a solved problem these days ... web servers and databases are know quantities. The hard part was image storage ... several hundred thousand users with several meg each of images becomes difficult fast. Instead, just hooked into S3 and the problem is solved ... they handle the rest and the code complexity from my end was really not more difficult than saving a file to the hard drive. Magic!
  • bnl
    I've thought about this some too, and it seems to imply that Amazon has spare, under-utilized capacity in its data centers. Microsoft, Yahoo and Google may be at higher utilization - and be unwilling to enter what is destined to become a low-margin, commodity service - banking on the fact that they can make more money with the machines - then renting out them out.
  • vrb
    posts like this are why i havent unsubscribed from your blog. "inane" comments (photowalking) are alot more purposeful (and tolerable) when mixed in with your tech related thoughts/analysis.
    Keep the link blog mentions to one or two a week, and ill stay a happy reader.
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