AWS technical advisor assesses EC2's evolution and the future of compute

There’s a critical moment in the evolution of a startup where customer demand outpaces current hardware capabilities. Investment in on-premises data centers and equipment means an outlay of funds that often just aren’t available.

In the past, this was the tipping point where many promising companies failed. But for the past 15 years, startups have had the option to scale fast and affordably thanks to Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Elastic Compute Cloud, better known as EC2.

“EC2 is a game-changer,” said Elaine Harvey (pictured), director and technical advisor at AWS. “The ability to just get capacity when you need it, you don’t have to go buy computers. You don’t have to have data center contracts. You just say: ‘I need a hundred of these.’ And, suddenly, you have a hundred of the instance you were asking for. It’s completely game-changing, especially for a startup where you just don’t have that capital to invest.”

Harvey spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Amazon EC2 15th Birthday Event. They discussed the effect of EC2 on startup culture and future developments for EC2 and AWS’ custom silicon line. (* Disclosure below.)

AWS Local Zones offer low latency for nationwide 5G

With 80 Availability Zones in 25 global Regions, and Local Zones starting to spread across the U.S., AWS is making good on its promise to be everywhere — an effort that is essential for edge computing, the internet of things and the rollout of 5G networks.

“What we are trying to do is get compute where customers need it,” Harvey said. “With this expansion, we’re trying to bring the EC2 offering to customers with much lower latency. That’s why we’re doing Local Zones, Regions, Availability Zones in so many places — so customers can have that compute with low latency to help them interact with their customers.”

One aspect of AWS Availability Zones and Regions that is essential for today’s downtime-intolerant business operations is that they are treated as “fault zones.”

“The fundamental way that we think about designing our services isolates faults between Regions and between Availability Zones,” Harvey explained.

Customers can rely on this and design systems with Multi-AZ behavior, knowing that any faults will be contained by boundaries.

“Their applications can be fault-tolerant, relying on those foundational fault domains effectively,” Harvey explained.

Graviton goes green

AWS is also working to reduce customers’ carbon footprints with the new Arm-based Graviton2 processors. While the statistic of 40% better price performance over comparable x86-based instances is well publicized, Harvey is more excited about the environmental credentials of Graviton2.

“It is not very well known, but Graviton is not only cost-to-compute higher efficiency, but it is also power-to-compute higher efficiency. It’s a greener option,” she said. “So, if a customer for a given workload wanted to reduce their carbon footprint, they can move to Graviton and it consumes substantially less power for the same workload.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Amazon EC2 15th Birthday Event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Amazon EC2 15th Birthday Event. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE