AWS launched in 2006, and since then we have released more than 530 services, features, and major announcements. Every year, we outpace the previous year in launches and are continuously accelerating the pace of innovation across the organization. Ever wonder how we formulate customer-centric ideas, turn them into features and services, and get them to market quickly? This session dives deep into how an idea becomes a service at AWS and how we continue to evolve the service after release through innovation at every level. We even spill the beans on how we manage operational excellence across our services to ensure the highest possible availability. Come learn about the rapid pace of innovation at AWS, and the culture that formulates magic behind the scenes.

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Managing the Pace of Innovation
Glenn Gore
Sr Manager, Solutions Architecture
Amazon Web Services

2. we will share organization and
mechanisms used by AWS.
do try this at home.

3. culture is the principal component in
speed of innovation

4. amazon leadership principles
http://bit.ly/leadershipValues

5. customer obsession
ownership
invent and simplify
right, a lot
hire and develop the best
insist on highest standards
think big bias for action
frugality
vocally self critical
earn trust
dive deep
have backbone; disagree & commit
deliver results

6. customer
obsession
invent &
simplify
insist on highest
standards
think big
bias for
action

7. ownership

8. deliver
results
have backbone;
disagree &
commit
dive deep
vocally self criticalearn trust
frugality
hire and develop the best

9. builder mechanisms

10. if you want something done right …
create a single-threaded team

11. two pizza teams

12. fitness functions

13. the Amazon decision making process
relies heavily on narratives.

14. writing a narrative helps you make best
use of time of everyone at the meeting.

15. the processing of writing your ideas helps you refine your
thoughts and articulate them effectively, while exposing key
gaps that you can refine before the meeting.

16. presentations are not the best medium for
consumption of highly analytical information

19. slides have choppy transitions that make it very
difficult to share a continuous stream of thought.

20. most interesting details are often
hidden in sub-sub-sub bullets.

21. slides are open for interpretation, and the same slides can
be used to present completely different stories.

22. audience is at the mercy of presenter to
gloss over details,
which is much more difficult to do in a narrative.

23. At Amazon, we always work backwards
from the customer.

24. each new idea, starts with a write-up of a press
release / FAQ that helps capture the customer
perspective of the problem we are trying to solve.

25. this process helps us exercise customer obsession by
compelling us to put on the shoes of the customers and see
the story from a customer’s perspective.

26. It helps us understand the problem we are
trying to solve, and if it is worth solving.

27. once we have identified the problems we
want to solve, we immediately start
working on finding the right primitives.
We put these primitives
behind hardened APIs.
notice how we
almost missed
this key detail

28. putting primitives behind hardened APIs helps our teams
innovate independently, while reaping benefit from each
other’s innovations.

29. once we have the right primitives, we ask
ourselves “can we simplify?”

30. We eat our own dog food, which enables us to put
ourselves in the shoes of the customers, and again,
compels us to be vocally self-critical to innovate on behalf
of our customers.

31. Consuming our own APIs allows us to
build primitives on top of primitives.

32. back to the
regularly scheduled programming

33. S3 for highly durable
object storage.

34. EC2 for computing

35. EBS for block storage.

36. Route53 health checks as a
monitoring and failover
primitive.

37. RDS is a composition of these
primitive for managed
databases.

38. EBS PiOPs: Inheritence

39. complete the innovation loop
with customers.

40. Amazon has a very metrics driven culture.

41. operational excellence

42. weekly ops metrics meeting.

43. A Scorecard for each service team.

44. a graph for
every metric that customers care about.

45. each graph has a line…

46. recall the fitness function?

47. Any metric going beyond the line is
considered a breach worthy of correction.

48. Correction of Error (COE)
process

49. Integration with the
Trouble Ticketing System

50. discussed at the OPS metrics
meetings

51. DevOps

52. old cycle

53. continuous deployments

54. new cycle

55. deployment once every 12 seconds

56. Automated Rollbacks and Health
Checks

57. f(innovation) = (org * arch)
(mechanisms * culture)

58. Thank you!