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.

1. Managing the Pace of Innovation: Behind the Scenes at
AWS
Charlie Bell and Khawaja Shams
November 13, 2013
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified, or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

2. we will share organization and
mechanisms used by AWS.
do try this at home.
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3. culture is the principal component in
speed of innovation
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4. amazon leadership principles
http://bit.ly/leadershipValues
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5. insist on highest standards
customer obsession
invent and simplify
think big
bias for action
dive deep
deliver results
ownership
have backbone; disagree & commit
vocally self critical
hire and develop the best
earn trust
right, a lot
frugality
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6. bias for
action
insist on highest
standards
customer
obsession
think big
invent &
simplify

7. ownership

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

9. builder mechanisms
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10. if you want something done right …
create a singlethreaded team
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11. two pizza teams
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12. fitness functions
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13. the Amazon decision making process relies
heavily on narratives.
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14. writing a narrative helps you make best use
of time of everyone at the meeting.
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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.
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16. presentations are not the best medium for
consumption of highly analytical information
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17. @ksshams

18. @ksshams

19. slides have choppy transitions that make it very
difficult to share a continuous stream of thought.
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20. most interesting details are often
hidden in sub-sub-sub bullets.
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21. slides are open for interpretation, and the same slides
can be used to present completely different stories.
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22. audience is at the mercy of presenter to
gloss over details,
which is much more difficult to do in a narrative.
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23. At Amazon, we always work
backwards from the customer.
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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.
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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.
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26. It helps us understand the problem we are
trying to solving, and if it is worth solving.
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27. once we have identified the problems we
want to solve, we immediately start working
on finding the right primitives.
notice how we
almost missed
this key detail
We put these
primitives
behind
hardened APIs.
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28. putting primitives behind hardened APIs helps our
teams innovate independently, while reaping benefit
from each other’s innovations.
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29. once we have the right primitives, we ask ourselves
“can we simplify?”
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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.
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31. Consuming our own APIs allows us to
build primitives on top of primitives.
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32. back to the
regularly scheduled programming
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33. S3 for highly durable
object storage.
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34. EC2 for computing
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35. EBS for block storage.
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36. Route53 health checks as a
monitoring and failover
primitive.
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37. RDS is a composition of
these primitive for managed
databases.
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38. EBS PiOPs: Inheritance
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39. complete the innovation loop
with customers.
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40. Amazon has a very metrics driven culture.
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41. operational excellence
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42. weekly ops metrics meeting.
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43. A Scorecard for each service team.
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44. a graph for
every metric that customers care about.
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45. each graph has a line…
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46. recall the fitness function?
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47. Any metric going beyond the line is
considered a breach worthy of
correction.
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48. Correction of Error (COE)
process
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49. Integration with the Trouble
Ticketing System
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50. discussed at the OPS
metrics meetings
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51. DevOps
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52. old cycle
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53. continuous deployments
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54. new cycle
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55. deployment once every 12 seconds
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56. @ksshams

57. (mechanisms * culture)
f(innovation) = (org * arch)
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58. Please give us your feedback on this
presentation
SPOT 201
As a thank you, we will select prize
winners daily for completed surveys!
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