Why AWS Dominates The Internet
Amazon is a scary-big company. You know that already. Their ledger books include $6 billion in media, $10 billion in product sales outside of North American and $23 billion in electronics and other weird things. The funniest (and scariest) part of all that is: that's not even how they're making most of their money. The largest chunk of their business comes from Amazon Web Services (AWS). The Amazon cloud. That's right plebeians, Amazon owns most of the digital atmosphere, too.
AWS is the delivery of cloud computing services by Amazon to businesses and individuals. You could use AWS to help host your blog, or a company could buy storage space to manage their database of clients. AWS is also used for processing power to run software and apps remotely. It makes it possible not to have to buy and run the hardware/servers it would require for that kind of computing power.
As of October 2017, it made $4.57 billion in revenue — for one quarter. Ha ha ha. Amazon's cloud computing business is on an $18 billion run rate, and it's steadily growing. And while you have just your casual folks using AWS for small stuff, Netflix uses AWS for almost all of its backend infrastructure, including storing and streaming. Other customers include Adobe, Airbnb, Yelp and Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Amazon's cloud computing business is on an $18 billion run rate, and it's growing.
How did AWS come to dominate the market? Through internal innovation. Before it got the fancy customers, AWS was used by Amazon itself in a mandate from CEO Jeff Bezos. He required that every team at Amazon start working with each other in systemic ways — if one team required data or information from another, they had to build an interface that worked to pull it out. Not only that, the interface couldn't just be some dinky, internal-use-only tool. It had to be good enough to be used by developers outside of Amazon. Essentially, he was asking each department at Amazon to act like its own mini-company, interacting and doing business with other mini-companies. And that was the start of AWS, which launched in 2002: a services-first mindset.
At first, AWS was pretty simple: a way to buy space and time using Amazon's network of computers. It then grew to storage, computing, database and internal messaging — the first two, Simple Storage Service and EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) are still the two main offerings today. Because pretty much, storage is the foundation of everything you do on the Interwebs, from hosting web pages and media to running a massive company (one of these days, ma). And while there are competitors (Google and Microsoft come to mind), Amazon wins on sheer functionality, and they have the flashy growth numbers to prove it. No one even comes close: check out the revenue stats in from October 2017, where AWS owns 30% of the market while the next closest, Microsoft Azure, owns 14%.
In a ranking of the most valuable IT certs in 2016, an AWS Certified Solutions Architect topped the list.
The cloud, and especially AWS, isn't going anywhere anytime soon. And if you happen to be the sort of enterprising person that wants to get in while the getting in is good: each of the five AWS certifications will bring you in an average salary of more than $100,000. In fact, in a ranking of the most valuable IT certs in 2016, an AWS Certified Solutions Architect tops the list at $125,000+. And as we grow only increasingly freaky in our desire for smart tech stuff, like artificial intelligence, virtual reality and IoT devices, cloud engineers will be critical in developing solutions that can mix in-house tech and outside systems (like AWS) seamlessly.
Check out the Amazon Web Services Certification Training Mega Bundle, which includes eight courses in the fundamentals, and even preps you for the certification training.
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