Amazon CTO: "Complex Cloud Systems Should Be Designed and Managed Simply"

"The Importance of Simplicity Principles
for Managing Increasingly Complex Systems"

Advice was given that simplicity should be the top priority when managing cloud-based IT infrastructure.

Werner Vogels, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Amazon, emphasized this point during his keynote speech on the morning of the 15th, the second day of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit. He stated, "The principle of simplexity, which is about managing systems efficiently, is crucial for effectively handling increasingly complex systems over time."

Werner Vogels, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Amazon, is delivering a keynote speech via video on the morning of the 15th, the second day of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit. Photo by Lee Myunghwan

The AWS Summit, which is being held for two days at COEX in Gangnam-gu, Seoul starting from the 14th, is considered the largest cloud technology conference in Korea. The keynote speech, held under the theme of 'Core Service Day,' focused on next-generation cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions.

Delivering his keynote via video, Vice President Vogels explained, "Simple and predictable solutions are better than theoretically efficient ones," adding, "The goal should not be to eliminate complexity, but to make it manageable and sustainable." To achieve this, he advised, "You should break down the system into manageable components and organize them into cell units, allowing the entire system to operate flexibly."

Following Vogels, Searchyoung Seo, Senior Vice President and Head of the Cloud Team at Samsung Electronics MX Division, explained that Samsung solved service issues caused by complexity by utilizing AWS cloud solutions. Samsung Electronics is the largest AWS customer in Korea in terms of usage. The company uses AWS solutions for services such as Samsung Pay, Samsung Cloud, and Galaxy AI.

Seo stated, "Major challenges included a lack of automation due to fragmented operations and operational methods that did not match the increasing scale of services, as well as unstructured cloud resource and cost management." He added, "From an organizational culture perspective, we established a FinOps framework to find optimization methodologies for cloud cost efficiency and collaborated with AWS."

Searchyoung Seo, Senior Vice President and Head of Cloud Team at Samsung Electronics MX Division, is delivering the keynote speech on the morning of the second day of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit on the 15th. Provided by AWS

Jaesoon Kim, CTO of Tmap Mobility, also said, "We decided to transition to the cloud due to reasons such as temporary contracts with infrastructure and data centers (IDC) to respond quickly to business changes, and increasing costs." He continued, "After switching to AWS solutions from an environment that processed 860,000 requests per second with 380 terabytes (TB) of storage, we achieved both efficiency and scalability, and were also able to reduce costs."

Next, Deepak Singh, Vice President of Next Generation Developer Experience at AWS, introduced 'Amazon Q Developer,' a generative AI assistant for software development. Amazon Q Developer not only assists developers by detecting errors in program code or providing simple support, but can also write requested content directly as code.

Singh emphasized, "Last year, we integrated Amazon Q Developer's Java (programming language) migration feature into our internal systems and migrated more than 30,000 Java applications from Java 8 to the new version, Java 17." He continued, "Through this, we saved approximately 4,500 years of development time and reduced costs by $260 million annually with a single upgrade."

During the keynote, startups Pozalabs and Supertone, both of which utilize AWS solutions, also gave presentations. Pozalabs specializes in AI music, while Supertone specializes in AI voice technology. On this day, music created by Pozalabs' AI was used as background music for the pre-event, and Supertone's technology was used to convert a foreign speaker's video speech into Korean voice and play it back.