The colossus that is now Amazon, with a stock price above $1,100 per share and over $4.5 billion in quarterly earnings, got its humble beginning in 1995 as a website that sold only books. Cloud computing at that time was a mere dream, but if Amazon Web Services Inc. had been an option (it didn’t officially launch until 2006), Jeff Bezos (Amazon’s founder) would have followed the cloud computing model that millions of businesses have done since.

“In the very early days of AWS, Jeff used to say, ‘If I was building Amazon today, I would have built it on top of AWS,’” said Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of AWS. “He knew what was coming, and he saw what people were still able to accomplish even with where the services were at that point.”

Jassy visited the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with co-hosts John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu) during this week’s AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed serverless computing, a “voice-first” strategy, new models for software development, and AWS’ competition.

Serverless plays major role

Not only would Amazon have been built on AWS, it would have taken full advantage of serverless computing, according to Jassy. While serverless remains a work in progress, and Amazon would not be built wholly on that platform even today, it holds promise for the future. The computing model, where the cloud provider does all the managing of machine resources and users pay only for what they need, has grown to become a significant part of AWS’ business.

“With a lot of the applications that comprise Amazon’s consumer business, we would build those on our serverless capabilities,” said Jassy, who described how Lambda (the severless compute platform) is running a number of significant applications today, including a major one for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc. “People are building real serious things on top of Lambda.”

On Thursday, AWS announced the release of Alexa for Business, an extension of the digital assistant platform for the workplace. This latest move is yet another signal that Amazon is deeply committed to a “voice-first” strategy.

“When you experience a voice app, it makes tapping on your phone circa 2010,” Jassy said. “The world will have a huge amount of voice applications, and it’s going to be people’s preference.”

One key part of AWS’ strategy is its acknowledgement of the renaissance currently taking place in software development. New hosting applications now require a great deal of effort to build, and the company, which is generating three to four new features on its platform per day, according to Jassy, is happy to make life easier for developers.

“It’s so much faster and so much more empowering to let your builders take advantage of that platform,” Jassy explained. “You get from idea to implementation in orders of magnitude faster using the cloud.”

In his keynote presentation on Wednesday, Jassy delivered a few pointed remarks about the competition, particularly Oracle. But the AWS executive downplayed concerns about competitors in his visit to theCUBE.

“The reality is if you don’t stay focused on your customers and what they care about, you’re wasting your time,” Jassy concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent.

Photo: SiliconANGLE