Building a brighter future through better tools

Darren Hardman, VP and General Manager, AWS UK&I

This week, Dr. Werner Vogels, VP and CTO at Amazon.com, took AWS re:Invent to an unconventional location for his annual keynote. Werner made his speech from Sugar City, a 150-year-old sugar factory in his hometown of Amsterdam.

The setting wasn’t just a fun change from the usual remote conferencing backdrop – it also served as a reminder of how the world has transformed since that same factory became operational in 1863. This was a pivotal period in the development of modern society, leading into the start of the second industrial revolution, when advancements in manufacturing and production innovation enabled builders to lay the foundations for the world we live in today.

Today, there’s a whole new kind of builder making a mark in our society – one who doesn’t work with bricks and machinery, but with software and code.

In my previous blog, I discussed how developing a reinvention culture can empower builders; here we’ll look at how better tools can help them to create a brighter future.

Better tools for unexpected times

The pandemic opened the door to a host of new, unexpected problems, and has magnified the importance of adaptable, cost-aware architecture to embed resilience into our customers’ operations.

But more than just resilience, these tools and services can help to build a better world if you look deeper. For example, moving to cloud can reduce your carbon footprint by up to 88%, making it as much a sustainable choice as it is a good business one.

This is why Werner says developers can have a disproportionate impact through their work, and it’s why, as builders, we need to figure out the smartest ways to help our customers reach their goals.

Whether that’s helping our customers become more sustainable by giving them the ability to adjust their services and make the best trade-offs, or by making our services easily and safely accessible for a much more distributed workforce.

This increased focus was part of the impetus behind the launch of AWS CloudShell. The service is a browser-based shell that makes it easy for our customers to securely manage, explore, and interact with their AWS resources, with as little friction as possible.

Dependable tools for uncertain times

As services and application become increasingly complex, it becomes both harder and more important to ensure that the tools we are working with are dependable. Werner used the old sugar factory he was speaking from as a simple example for why diversity is so important when ensuring dependability.

For three months of the year during the harvest season – the single most important time of year for the business – the old sugar factory would run non-stop, with workers even sleeping in the factory to make sure processes kept moving.

During these periods, even the slightest downtime would’ve been devastating to the business. To prevent that possibility, the factory-owners built diversity into their system – in their case, that meant two separate generators of different brands to make sure there was as little chance as possible both generators went down.

Werner likened this to Zoom’s choice to split its application services as the pandemic started and the company began to suddenly see 30x growth.

By splitting the service by their bandwidth or latency needs and moving from manual scale to an automated one, they were able to use cloud to deal with traffic control, handle their extreme scaling and even add new features.

Smarter tools for more complex times

As I’ve discussed previously, as tech advances and systems become increasingly complex, we will continue to look to Machine Learning (ML) to do more of the heavy lifting when it comes to managing our services and applications.

ML is helping us improve the entire app development lifecycle and the more closely you examine your operations, the more places you will see room for ML-fuelled optimisation – from improving services and business operations to providing better end-user outcomes.

That’s why Werner concluded his keynote by urging all developers to talk to their customers and directly address the issues causing them uncertainty. With this focus on real-life problems, combined with imagination and tenacity, we can all develop a reinvention culture.