Notes about Cutting-Edge Technologies and Everything

Innovation has always been part of the Amazon DNA, but about 20 years ago, we went through a radical transformation with the goal of making our iterative process—"invent, launch, reinvent, relaunch, start over, rinse, repeat, again and again"—even faster. The changes we made affected both how we built applications and how we organized our company. Back then, we had only a small fraction of the number of customers that Amazon serves today. Still, we knew that if we wanted to expand the products and services we offered, we had to change the way we approached application architecture. The giant, monolithic "bookstore" application and giant database that we used to power Amazon.com limited our speed and agility. Whenever we wanted to add a new feature or product for our customers, like video streaming, we had to edit and rewrite vast amounts of code on an application that we'd designed specifically for our first product—the bookstore. This was a long, unwieldy p...

Use Cases When we are in the outdoors, many of us often feel the need for a camera- that is intelligent enough to follow us, adjust to the terrain heights and visually navigate through the obstacles, while capturing panoramic videos.  Here, I am talking about autonomous self-flying drones, very similar to cars on auto pilot. The difference is that we are starting to see proliferation of artificial intelligence into affordable, everyday use cases, compared to relatively expensive cars. These new use cases mean: (1) They will need parallel compute processing to crunch through insane amount of data (visual or otherwise) in real time for inferences and training of deep learning neural network algorithms. This helps them distinguish between objects and get better with more data. Think like a leap of compute processing by 100x, due to the real time nature of the use cases (2) They will need the deep learning software frameworks, so that data scientists & data engi...

In some recent blog posts, we’ve explained why we believe it’s crucial to adopt a four‑tier application architecture in which applications are developed and deployed as sets of microservices . It’s becoming increasingly clear that if you keep using development processes and application architectures that worked just fine ten years ago, you simply can’t move fast enough to capture and hold the interest of mobile users who can choose from an ever‑growing number of apps. Switching to a microservices architecture creates exciting opportunities in the marketplace for companies. For system architects and developers, it promises an unprecedented level of control and speed as they deliver innovative new web experiences to customers. But at such a breathless pace, it can feel like there’s not a lot of room for error. In the real world, you can’t stop developing and deploying your apps as you retool the processes for doing so. You know that your future success depends on transitio...