Andy Jassy

Most people still think of Amazon primarily as an online retailer, but the elevation of Andy Jassy to take over from Jeff Bezos as CEO provides further evidence for the strategic importance of Amazon Web Services (AWS) within the Amazon group.

AWS was launched in 2002 and relaunched in 2006. In March 2008, Om Malik published an interview with Ray Ozzie, then the Chief Software Architect at Microsoft, which included some positive comments about AWS. By the end of the year, both Google and Microsoft had announced rival cloud computing offerings. As far as I can see, cloud computing first appeared as an Emerging Technology on the Gartner Hype Curve (it's not a cycle) in 2008, reaching the Peak of Inflated Expectations by 2009.

During that period, I was a software industry analyst, calling out Jeff Bezos and Ray Ozzie as two of the most visionary players in the industry. My colleague Lawrence Wilkes wrote a long report on AWS in 2004. (But the hype around cloud computing took off later, and the broader awareness of AWS is comparatively recent, so I'm not convinced that the classic hype curve applies to this topic.)

Alongside the news of Jassy's elevation, today's tech press also reports that Google Cloud is still making massive losses. So much for the Slope of Enlightenment then.

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Jasper Jolly, Bezos leaves Amazon in its prime – keeping it that way is the task (The Guardian, 3 February 2021)

Kieren McCarthy, So Jeff Bezos is stepping back from Amazon to play with his space rockets. Who's this Andy Jassy chap? (The Register, 3 February 2021)

Om Malik, GigaOM Interview: Ray Ozzie (GigaOM, 10 March 2008)

Ron Miller, What Andy Jassy’s promotion to Amazon CEO could mean for AWS (TechCrunch, 2 February 2021)

Simon Sharwood, Google's cloud services lost $14.6bn over three years – and CEO Sundar Pichai likes that trajectory (The Register, 3 February 2021)

Lawrence Wilkes, Amazon and eBay Web Services - The new enterprise applications? (CBDI Journal, October 2004) 

Related posts: Jeff Bezos and Ecosystem Thinking (February 2004), Amazon and eBay (August 2004), Internet Service Disruption (November 2005), Ray Ozzie (March 2008), Utility Computing and Profitability (March 2008)

Also Technology Hype Curve (September 2005)

Web Services Dashboard

IBM is currently launching web service management tools into the WebSphere/Tivoli space, including a web services dashboard. This now appears as two slightly different products: IBM Web Services Navigator and IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Web Services.

• IBM page
• CBDI Commentary (21st October 2004)

The web services dashboard is designed to support the "Services Architect". This is a new role, acting as broker between development and operations. IBM estimates that 70% of services architects will have a development background and 30% will have an operations background. 

The web services dashboard displays the interaction patterns of web services, and these can be tracked against predefined profiles. A service profile is a recognised pattern of service interactions (an orchestration scenario). A service profile distribution is a statistical pattern indicating the occurrence of service profiles. (For example, this might allow the system to generate an alert if a given exception condition is executed for more than x% of cases. More generally, it supports Statistical Process Control.) Deviation from accepted service profiles or profile distributions may generate an alert, demanding someone's attention. Alternatively, the alert may be passed as a signal to the web service platform, where it triggers some autonomic response. 

A major issue for any tool of this kind is scalability. A screenful of information may be good enough for a small demonstration, but how does the tool cope with larger and more complex situations, when the information would spill over many screens? 

This is precisely why you need an architect, who can break the information down into manageable chunks. In a separate post on Web Service Management, I discuss the role of the service architect, and the web services management process.