Las Vegas The developers greet the 63-year-old head of technology like a rock star. When Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer of the Amazon Group, takes the stage, applause rises. Visitors to the Reinvent developer conference have been waiting for his keynote. Once a year, Amazon’s cloud division shows its innovations here in Las Vegas – and Vogels is the headliner of this technology festival.
As the chief technology officer of the world’s largest e-commerce group, Vogels has been responsible for the technological innovations of the billion-dollar company since 2005. He is also considered one of the pioneers of the cloud division AWS, which emerged 15 years ago from Amazon’s own infrastructure.
Since 2013 alone, the division’s sales have more than quadrupled from $ 3.1 billion to $ 45.4 billion in 2020. Eight out of ten companies in Germany used cloud services in 2020. With a global market share of almost 50 percent, Amazon has been the undisputed industry leader for years.
In Las Vegas, Vogels talks about his latest plan: he wants to conquer space. “There is an immense interest in exploring space or making it usable,” explains the Amazon technical director in an interview with the Handelsblatt.
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This is especially true since the cost of satellites has recently fallen sharply. “For young companies, there are still major hurdles – such as setting up a ground station that communicates with the satellites.”
The cloud is becoming more important in almost every industry
It is one of the numerous attempts by Amazon to spread the business with cloud-based IT services in as many industries as possible. Whether the financial industry, space or transport and logistics: the group invited individual representatives from almost every economic sector to its developer conference, who reported on their positive experiences with the cloud.
Be it Nasdaq boss Adena Friedman, who now wants to gradually relocate individual markets on the exchange to the cloud – starting with the US options exchange. Or Goldman Sachs boss David Solomon, who will in future give his customers access to the investment bank’s financial database via the cloud.
The signal that AWS wants to send with these partnerships is clear: The cloud is now also suitable for critical areas – and can also adapt to the strictest of regulations. Above all, technological innovations should help. The Handelsblatt spoke to Vogels about the three most important ones.
1. The cloud in space
For many decades, exploring space was reserved exclusively for researchers – but thanks to companies like SpaceX, who have developed an inexpensive way of putting satellites into orbit with their reusable rockets, space travel is also becoming increasingly interesting for private companies.
For some time now, AWS has been offering its own ground stations that customers can use. The data is transferred directly to the group’s data centers. The US space company Capella Space, founded in 2016, uses the AWS cloud to call up live satellite images in extremely detailed form from the satellites in space and make them usable. Research institutions such as the Muhammad bin Raschid Space Center from Dubai are also among the AWS partners.
AWS currently operates its ground stations in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Australia, and Africa. The data collected via the satellites is available almost in real time via an input console, the use of which is billed according to time. “I think it is important that we lower the barriers even further,” said Vogels.
As head of technology at the world’s largest e-commerce group, the Dutchman has been responsible for Amazon’s technological innovations since 2005.
(Photo: picture alliance / Picture Allia)
2. The cloud for the factory floor
For AWS as a cloud provider, it is essential that customers can freely choose the storage location. In many countries there are special data protection rules that make it difficult to transfer personal data abroad. In Europe, for example, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) applies, which gives companies precise guidelines on where, for example, which user data may be processed and when.
Many companies are correspondingly cautious: In a survey by competitor Ionos, around 56 percent of the companies surveyed from Germany stated that they insist that their sensitive data be stored in Germany. A location within the EU is sufficient for 31 percent.
With its new Outpost service, AWS is now making a large part of its cloud functions available locally. In future, customers will receive their own server on request, which they can set up on their premises, says Vogels. “That makes it even easier for companies to follow the data protection rules of their region.”
Vogels emphasized the two-stage approach that AWS is pursuing here. “On the one hand, we have to ensure that our customers can comply with the applicable rules,” says the IT expert. This happens in the case of specifications about the storage location of data, for example via separate servers that the company can set up at any location. On the other hand, the group is also investing in educational work with the regulators. “There are laws that are ten, 20 or 30 years old.”
3. The quantum cloud
The head of technology also expects major innovations in the future in so-called quantum computing. For some time now, AWS has also been offering its customers access to quantum computers via the cloud. However, it will take some time before the technology really catches on in practice.
Only two months ago, AWS announced that it was working on its own processor – with an unclear target date. Only devices from other manufacturers such as D-Wave, IonQ and Rigetti are currently available via the cloud, which are at best suitable for research and development purposes due to their low performance and susceptibility to errors.
But Vogels is convinced that this will change – at least for selected applications – within the next five to ten years. “Then we will see a massive use of quantum technology, which will bring important benefits in production because of its faster computing power,” said the CTO. Even if quantum computers would probably not take over the world, as science fiction novels from the 1970s prophesied.
More: Amazon’s quantum cloud: from research laboratory to industrial application.