Episode 30: How to Compete with Amazon

Trying to figure out if Amazon Web Services (AWS) is right for you? Use the “quadrant of doom” to determine your answer. When designing a Cloud architecture, there are factors to consider. Any system you design exists for one reason - support a business. Think about services and their features to make sure they’re right for your implementation.

Today, we’re talking to Ernesto Marquez, owner and project director at Concurrency Labs. He helps startups launch and grow their applications on AWS. Ernesto especially enjoys building serverless architectures, automating everything, and helping customers cut their AWS costs.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Amazon’s level of discipline, process, and willingness to recognize issues and fix them changed the way Ernesto sees how a system should be operated
• Specialize on a specific service within AWS, such as S3 and EC2, because there are principles that need to be applied when designing an architecture
• Sales and Delivery Cycle: Ernesto has a conversation with a client to discuss their different needs
• Vendor Lock-in: Customers concerned about moving application to Cloud provider and how difficult it will be to move code and design variables elsewhere
• For every service you include in your architecture, evaluate the service within the context of a particular business case
• Identify failure scenarios, what can go wrong, and if something goes wrong, how it’s going to be remediated
• CloudWatching detects events that are going to happen, and you can trigger responses for those events
• Partnering with Amazon: Companies are pushing a multi-Cloud narrative; you gain visibility and credibility, but it’s not essential to be successful
• Can you compete against Amazon? Depends on which area you choose
• Expand product selection to grow, focus on user experience, and improve performance to compete against Amazon
• MiserBot: Don’t freak out about your bill because Ernesto created a Slack chatbot to monitor your AWS costs

Links:

• Concurrency Labs
• Ernesto Marquez on Twitter
• How to Know if an AWS is Right for You
• MiserBot
• AWS
• RDS
• Lambda
• Digital Ocean