[New Wave] In an Era of Change, Fundamentals Matter

AWS Summit, the largest cloud event in Korea with tens of thousands of participants every year, was held online this year due to social distancing measures. The keynote speech by Dr. Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Amazon.com, offers valuable lessons on the changes we are facing, which we would like to introduce through this article.

Over the past few months, as remote work and online activities have increased, the demand for cloud systems has exploded. In North America, daytime viewing hours for video streaming services increased by 40%, with a total of 161 billion minutes consumed in the last week of March alone. This is more than double last year's average of 70 billion minutes. Despite the rapid increase in demand, streaming companies using cloud services have been able to provide their services without major issues.

Dr. Vogels compared the technological foundation supporting online services used by hundreds of millions of people to building a physical structure. If the foundation is not solid, structural problems arise, weakening the building's stability and functionality over time. In fact, the online service outages we commonly experience occur because these 'fundamentals' are not properly established. Dr. Vogels emphasized focusing on the fundamentals: ▲distributing user traffic globally, ▲automatically scaling up or down the computers responding to user requests, and ▲effectively designing for performance and cost.

Cloud services are built on these fundamentals. They enable automatic scaling to meet immediate service demand and can effectively respond by analyzing past records to predict service demand and resources. Such rapid changes impact not only the aforementioned streaming companies but also traditional businesses that must immediately shift to online operations. This is why there are stories that digital transformation, which previously took years to implement, has now been achieved.

Companies facing digital transformation challenges may think they need significant investments, but the cloud offers a completely different solution. Recently in Italy, when grocery shopping became difficult due to long lines outside stores, an application called FillIndiana, created by four students from Politecnico di Milano, emerged. Thanks to this app, which measures expected waiting times, consumers can immediately find the fastest place to buy groceries. Built on a cloud-based serverless architecture, this app operates stably even with millions of users accessing it.

In Korea, websites like Mask Alarm, created by students from Korea University, also handled millions of users without any issues. Interestingly, these students are not computer science majors. It is remarkable that four non-major students developed the app in just a few days based on self-learned coding skills and cloud technology. This clearly shows that anyone can realize their ideas by mastering the fundamentals of cloud design. Since enterprise-level designs are the same, everyone can enjoy the benefits of the cloud regardless of company size or business type.

Of course, mastering the fundamentals requires a certain level of learning and review. Dr. Vogels recommended individuals seek opportunities to learn new technologies such as cloud computing, data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) that can create new value. For companies, he advised taking time to look inside their systems, which may have been neglected due to lack of time, and optimize anything that deviates from the fundamentals.

He said that due to unprecedented changes recently, a truly new era of technology is unfolding over the past few months, and we are experiencing fundamental changes in perspectives and approaches to technology. Change does not happen gradually but rapidly. How we respond to this depends on our attitude.

Yoon Seok-chan, AWS Senior Tech Evangelist