The brand new AWS Europe (Zurich) Area and 16 years of Swiss innovation

A while in the past, I wrote to you about our plans to launch a brand new AWS Area in Switzerland. The wait is over. Beginning right now, now you can use the AWS Europe (Zurich) Area.

I’ve been pondering so much these days about how the cloud, and extra particularly AWS, has developed since we first launched in 2006. Again then the cloud was a spot. It was a single spot that you might level to on a map. For Amazon, that place was us-east-1 in North Virginia. Now the cloud is all over the place – it’s round us. AWS covers 6 continents, 28 Areas, and 90 Availability Zones. Entry to infrastructure is now not a bottleneck for innovation. However this wasn’t at all times the case.

For a very long time, the most important constraint on innovation was the fee to buy and function {hardware} at scale. With the cloud, this constraint disappeared virtually in a single day. {Hardware} grew to become a programmable useful resource that you might spin up and spin down at a second’s discover. AWS gave you entry to as a lot capability as you wished, everytime you wished it – and for the primary time, it was inexpensive. For those who can think about it, again in 2006 we solely had a single EC2 occasion, the m1.small. In the present day, there are nicely over 500 situations, all the pieces from large reminiscence machines to Apple M1s (and for the historical past buffs, here is a timeline of EC2 releases).

Now we have by no means seemed again. Now we have by no means stopped innovating for our prospects.

One thing that I’ve seen through the years, is that the concepts that dramatically change the best way that we take into consideration or do issues are not often novel. Reasonably, they’re usually a mixture of an current idea with a brand new strategy, a brand new expertise, a brand new functionality.

Whereas I used to be in Zurich for Swiss Cloud Day, I had an opportunity to fulfill with Verity, an AWS buyer that’s reimagining warehouse logistics. Now, everyone knows that utilizing robotic programs in warehouses is nothing new – we use them extensively at Amazon. They assist people kind gadgets into bins, decide merchandise off of cabinets, and robotically package deal them for supply. Nonetheless, Verity is constructing on this.

They’ve created a completely autonomous stock administration system. Self-flying drones geared up with environmental sensors and cameras can constantly monitor a warehouse offering real-time stock monitoring that’s extraordinarily correct. In lots of instances, it fully removes the necessity to manually depend inventory and reduces the necessity to run equipment related to it. This frees up employees to carry out extra beneficial duties, reduces danger, and saves energy on the identical time. And that is simply the beginning, extra knowledge will reveal extra insights and alternatives for purchasers. AWS is offering the companies that permit Verity to deal with making warehouses greener, safer, and extra environment friendly, not on working and sustaining infrastructure.

If I’m being trustworthy, that is the kind of innovation I’ve come to anticipate from our Swiss prospects. You’ve been with us from our earliest days and I’m excited to see what you construct subsequent.