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AWS value proposition

Why build on Amazon Web Services? Vogels said because there are compelling business and technical advantages:

• Total Cost: Running services via Amazon is substantially lower than building infrastructure and running it on your own;
• Pay as you go: Pay only for what you consume;
• Time to market: AWS lets businesses focus on their core competency instead of
  infrastructure;
• Scalability: Automatic scalability is guaranteed by adding more hardware;
• Robustness: Amazon guarantees 99.9999% of up time;
• Security: Using Amazon Services collectively makes your offering more secure;
• Technical complexity: Building things from scratch requires a lot of knowledge and experience.

Werner Vogels: focus on your idea!

Dr. Vogels made the case for why it makes
sense for businesses, particularly startups, to use AWS. He started by pointing out
that building Web-scale services is incredibly difficult. He showed examples of traffic graphs
from major retailers like Target and Walmart that demonstrated that even these companies are not
able to handle peak loads. He added that conventional wisdom is just wrong when it comes to understanding
what it takes to build a scalable infrastructure.

For startups, Vogels advocated the 37Signals philosophy - build now, scale later. This is not because
scaling isn't important, it is because scaling is just too hard. As a young company, focusing
on infrastructure is very costly. His statistics indicated that up to 70% of resources
can go into what he calls Undifferentiated heavy lifting - work that does not fit
into your company's core competency. Instead, he suggests that businesses should rely on AWS to do
all this work.