AWS re:Invent 2013, the largest gathering of developers and technical leaders from the AWS community, took place between November 12 and 15 in Las Vegas. Eight thousand people joined the event, and most of them sat through the Keynotes, learning from the use cases and business experiences shared by the speakers.

First to take the stage was Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President with Amazon Web Services who, unsurprisingly, started with a small history of AWS itself.

“We started working on AWS a little over 10 years ago and we’ve been on the market for seven and a half years now,” said Jassy. “We’ve built a very robust, fully featured technology infrastructure platform that has great services and depth of features within those services.”

Enumerating just a couple masterpieces in the AWS portfolio, Jassy mentioned the “compute services, the storage services, the multiple database servers and a very broad array of app services.” A force to be reckoned with, AWS stands out most of all due to its pace of innovation.

Equally responsible for its success are the AWS partners: “Our partners are helping customers build on top of the AWS. From the very start of AWS, we’ve always believed that having a vibrant ecosystem was going to be very strategic because customers want help figuring out how to move into the cloud and they want to be able to run the same software they’ve been running forever, but based on our technology infrastructure platform,” said Jassy.

With a 700 percent growth boost since the beginning of the year alone, Jassy could afford to sport a wide smile in front of the audience. The AWS Marketplace is one of the fastest growing businesses in AWS. Gartner, the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company, appreciated that AWS had five times the server capacity deployed by the other 14 providers combined.

Andy Jassy attempted to explain the sudden appeal of the cloud. Why are so many companies – big and small – moving to the cloud? For several reasons. Whatever size they are, it’s about security.

“If you have customer data that matters, your number one priority as a company is making sure that data is secured. That’s our number one priority too as a platform,” confided Jassy.

Introducing AWS CloudTrail

Continuing the tradition of launching a brand new product with each re:Invent Conference, the Senior Vice President with Amazon Web Services proudly announced AWS CloudTrail.

“CloudTrail is a service that logs all the API calls that you make to your AWS resources,” Jassy started. “It tells you who’s making the APIs calls, what they’re asking to have changed, which resources are being changed, and where these API calls are coming from. We store all that data in S3 where you can archive it to AmazonGlacier if you prefer.

“AWS CloudTrail works in conjunction with all the other third party logging tools that people use today: Splunk, Sumo Logic, Loggly. This allows companies not only to tun sophisticated security analysis, but also to better work their compliance and governance. This is an area we’ve gotten a lot of feedback from the customers over time, and we’re excited to offer it today and we’re going to add more things to this service and around this area over time,” boasted Jassy.

Another reason customers are moving to the cloud is availability.

A study performed by Nucleus Research compared customers’ data before they moved to AWS and after, and the data revealed that after moving to AWS they had 32 percent less downtime than when they were running on-premise.

“Cost is often the conversation starter,” noticed Jassy. There are lower costs with AWS and the more you use AWS, the lower your fees are.

“We have an interesting dynamic in our business: we have this circle where the more customers we have and the more AWS usage it drives, the more infrastructure we have to buy, and the more economy we scale, lowering infrastructure costs and reducing prices in the end,” explained Jassy.

A different philosophy

“We’re obsessed with saving customers’ money that we do things like this Trusted Advisor program. We are looking at customers setup on top of AWS and try to advise them when they do something inefficient. We are looking at customers who are doing steady workloads, using on-demand instead of reserved instances, or we look for customers with a lot of idle instances who are just wasting money, pro-actively reaching out to customers and teaching them how to save money.”

A company who looks after the customers’ best interest? Andy Jassy swears by it. “This year alone we sent roughly a million of notifications, 700,000 of which have been opened and acted upon, which saved customers 140 million dollars. How many technology companies pro-actively call up their customers and ask them to spend less money with them… Not that many. But we have a different philosophy,” claimed Jassy. “We try to build a long-term relationship with the customer and a business that outlasts all of us.”

Even though cost is what often starts the conversation with the cloud, over time Andy noted that one of the top driver for the companies moving to the cloud has been the ability to have increased agility.

• Why does agility matter?

“In this day and age you are at a huge competitive disadvantage if you are not able to move fast. You can look at startups that have moved into pretty stable areas, and radically disrupted them. Just look at what Airbnb has done with hotels, what Spotify has done to the music space, Dropbox with storage and Instagram with photos or Uber in the Taxi space,” prompted Jassy. “These have been relatively stable businesses that have been disrupted. Enterprises can’t afford to be slow anymore,” he warned.

Further preaching his love for the cloud, Andy explained: “Anybody who does a lot of invention will tell you that the two most important factors are 1) being able to try a lot of experiments and 2) avoiding the collateral damage of those experiments. In the cloud you can spin up thousands of experiments and instances in minutes. If those experiments don’t work out, you can either reuse those instances for other experiments or you can give them back to us and stop paying for them. That’s a huge difference in the model.”

Apart from the financial benefits, the cloud benefits people and organizations because it encourages everyone to spend more time thinking about inventing, as they have the hope it might actually get implemented in a reasonable time frame.

“As the cloud has become so pervasive, I get asked what’s going to happen to the IT teams. They are not going to go away. They work on value added activities on top of the infrastructure instead of racking and stacking,” clarified Jassy. “However, I don’t get asked ‘How do I get my people to think about new ideas and improvements for my customers?’ People working in enterprises want to innovate things for their customers as much as people working in start-ups, but they’ve been blocked by the infrastructure,” reckoned Andy Jassy. “The cloud changes everything: it unleashes innovation up and down the organization.”

• Does agility resume to speed of deployment?

“There’s no doubt that being able to deploy new ideas quicker will provide agility,” said Jassy. “However, you still have to build the application, and if you have a way to avoid that, getting from idea/concept to fast deployment gives you a lot of agility.”

Many people are confused at this point, perceiving the cloud as just a data-center. “The cloud and AWS is about a lot more than data-centers,” said Jassy. “You get the infrastructure software, the hardware, and the data center services wrapped neatly together in services like compute, storage or data base. You don’t have to spend the time and money to write or buy the infrastructure software, or to negotiate with vendors and set up data centers.”

Saving money and lending an ear

“Customers want their servers to have real deep features. If you look at the pace of innovation in AWS, Amazon Redshift is a great example. This is the data warehouse service that we announced at last year’s re:Invent. We opened it up for everybody in February 2013, and in less than 9 months we have launched 26 new features that continued to improve its capabilities, all of them requested by the users.”