In my first dedicated week of AWS study, I went through the Introduction to AWS Course, the AWS Certification Preparation Guide, and the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Course. In this article, I'll to outline some of my thoughts on how AWS, or cloud technologies in general, has shifted my perspective on business.
Dirt Cheap Startup Costs
During one of the videos I was watching, the instructor mentioned that A Cloud Guru didn't see a bill from AWS for years. Think about that for a second. They built a fully functional, production-grade application, hosted all of their course content, and were generating revenue before they paid a dime for the underlying infrastructure.
This aligns well with some of my own startup beliefs. I strongly believe that most hard working, smart individuals can create profitable businesses if they have enough runway. And AWS gives you a ton of runway.
This is particularly true for startups with one or more tech-savvy cofounders. If you know what you're doing, you can validate your business assumptions while spending next to nothing and then scale to compete with the biggest companies in the world.
On a personal note, I'm working on creating an online course right now. It's still in the early stages so I won't go into details but I created a cost analysis for the site this last week. Even in scaling to tens of thousands of users, my cloud bill would likely be under a hundred dollars per month. That's insane.
Elastic Scalability
When I think of scale in the tech world, it's typically the big companies that come to mind like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. These companies have a ton of resources, both in terms of people and in terms of capital. 15 years ago, there was really no way to compete with companies like that. The barrier to entry was just too high.
With AWS, that's all changed. You only pay for resources you need and only when you're using them. Not only does this save a ton of money, but it also keeps costs super low when it matters most (i.e. when the company is just starting out). And then once you're making money, you can easily scale, assuming your data models work at scale.
Cloud First Companies
Another interesting statement that came out of these initial courses is that most companies still haven't moved to the cloud, though they'll need to in the years ahead. This creates an amazing opportunity for new businesses to move in on incumbent, legacy code market leaders.
Two thoughts here:
1
If you're creating a startup today that's cloud first and you structure your data correctly, you'll immediately have an advantage over large, non-cloud competitors because your product will be faster, more durable, and cheaper. Additionally, and probably more important, you'll have greater velocity than your competitors.
2
If you're moving a legacy application to the cloud, you need to restructure the data models as a fast-follow. While AWS has a lot of advantages in terms of cost, it's also decreased the barrier to entry for new companies. AWS is a great example of this. To handle the scale of their system, they moved around 90% of Amazon data over to DynamoDB to take advantage of horizontal scaling.
Machine Learning
Before settling on AWS, I was strongly considering machine learning as the next step in my professional growth. While I'm happy with the decision I made, I'm now realizing that machine learning needs to be a part of my career at some point.
I've said this before but I'm a big believer in the concept of the adjacent possible where most innovation is just one step beyond the current cutting edge. In learning more about AWS, I've had more ideas than normal for new products and businesses. But machine learning would take that to the next level.