Broadcasting live from the AWS re:invent Conference in Las Vegas, theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante, asked their guest Matt VanBergen of CityTech to comment on the current event and recent Amazon innovations from the CTO standpoint.

“It’s very, very innovative; it’s the best opportunity for software developers and architects,” stated VanBergen, who recalled that in the past one had to rely on hardware people to set up the servers, and allocate storage. What’s happening now is “turning things upside down” in VanBergen’s opinion “as far as how IT is being done.”

“We’re not an infrastructure company, we never have been; we’ve always been software,” clarified VanBergen. “This allows us to jump in right away and offer a turn-key solution without having to build our data centers.”

Experiment fast, minimize damage

Citing Andy Jassy’s keynote, which mentioned the word “experiment” a great deal in connection with the cloud, Furrier asked VanBergen to share his impression on the mindset of people using the cloud. Vellante added that one “should be able to experiment fast and minimize collateral damage.”

“We’ve seen adoption happening in different ways,” said VanBergen. “Sometimes people want to go full-scale, get in, maybe for specific application, but a lot of times our opportunities come around where there are performance issues with on-premise application.”

Part of resolving the problem is spinning that application on AWS. “It’s an experiment; we want to see how an application performs in a known environment.” This way they try to identify whether there is a problem with the hardware or the software. And, in the end, “if the application runs better on AWS, why not just move it there?”

How AWS impacted CityTech’s business

VanBergen’s company, CityTech, has been around since 2003, pre-AWS era. Three years in, AWS announced S3 and EC2. Vellante asked Matt to take the viewers back to that time, explaining a bit their business model and how AWS impacted it.

“We are a global IT consultancy specialized primarily in general enterprise application development. By 2005-2006 we started getting into large scale web content management implementations and started seeing that we needed a development environment that we could stand up the developers’ projects on. Initially we leveraged AWS for those type of purposes; it was more of a utility for us,” admitted VanBergen. “As Amazon started releasing more services and public cloud computing infrastructure service became more popular, we started defining our business around Amazon Web Services.”

• Appealing APIs

VanBergen narrated with candor how, in the early days, his team started experimenting with AWS themselves, a bit pessimistic in the beginning, not sure if it was going to provide the performance required, but they were attracted by the API. “The way that Amazon architected it, theirs services were more API-based first, before the beautiful interface.”

In contrast, “a lot of developers go for the glitz upfront, and then you ask how to automate things backend – Amazon flipped that around,” VanBergen noted. They built the fundamental pieces of architecture and enabled them through APIs, then had those beautiful interfaces for front-ends built. “We really loved that,” recalled VanBergen, “because we’re software developers and we love automate things, and that fit right where we wanted to go.”

Another great thing that Amazon did was listening to the feedback provided by the developers. Vellante asked VanBergen to provide an example, explaining how that impacted their business.

“We gave a lot of feedback early on when Route 53 came out – the DNS provider capability. We thought it lacked a few features and, as an Amazon partner since the beginning, we have routine calls with their solution architects. So we provided feedback regarding what we thought was missing in order for us to rely solely on Route 53 and not worry about different DNS providers,” explained VanBergen.

• Building business on AWS 

Vellante summed the CityTech business model up: “You have this commodity infrastructure, which is the AWS, you build value on top of that, you create and manage services, as well as writing applications with your clients.”

“What types of applications?” inquired Vellante, asking for VanBergen to elaborate on his engagement with the customers.

“First types of applications: we’ve grown to be head expertise in the large scale content management space. Today, the new term would be ‘web experience management’. And that’s large-scale that websites for Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies, also mobile applications on top of that. Today we provide a managed hosting service for web experience management – specifically the Adobe platform – and we run it on AWS. Our clients might be worldwide organizations that require content to be delivered efficiently, in multiple languages, ans we can bring that platform out in the cloud and deliver globally because AWS has a global footprint infrastructure,” explained VanBergen.

Their stack has AWS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux as an operating system and Adobe experience manager as the web content manager system. We’ve developed lifecycle-type management capabilities around the infrastructure provisioning so we can automate the standing up of server instances and deployments.”