Introduction to Cloud Architecture. In this lesson, you will learn what is the cloud, how to create and read a technical architecture diagram and why companies in the cloud outperform those not yet in the cloud. Hello, I'm Gordon Yu, Technical Program Manager at AWS and your co-instructor for this specialization. During this lesson, I'll help you answer the following question, why was Airbnb successful? Airbnb started as three guys, they bought three air mattresses, stacked them up in their living room and called their house a bed and breakfast. Next, they wanted to figure out how to charge guests money for the privilege of sleeping on their air mattresses. They welcomed their first customer and launched their first website in 2008. By 2015, Airbnb celebrated 10 million nights booked with one booking every two seconds. Now think about this in 2008, when the three founders made their website public, there were many international hotel chains. Those hotel chains owned and managed thousands of properties in hundreds of countries around the world. They made billions of dollars in revenue each year and employed some of the best and brightest minds in hospitality management. Those people could have challenged Airbnb, they could have launched their own imitation websites and taken over, or at least shared the market, but they didn't. Today Airbnb is worth more than the three largest hotel chains combined. Why didn't those massive, well-resourced industry incumbents able to take over or even keep up with Airbnb's ideas? Why weren't they able to run at that same rate Airbnb did all the way back in 2008? And the answer is that AWS launched in 2006. So two years later, Airbnb founders made the strategic choice to go cloud native. Cloud native means that Airbnb built their website and app on a public cloud, namely AWS. Doing so enables Airbnb to scale infinitely every time more hosts listed more properties on Airbnb; every time more guests signed up; And every time a guest booked with a host AWS automatically increase the number of computing resources powering Airbnb's website and app. Because AWS has many data centers and servers every time Airbnb's resources approach capacity, AWS would simply provision more resources. That's how Airbnb scaled to the international reach and popularity it has today. What about the international hotel chains? Since they were in business long before AWS launched, they built their technologies on a traditional on-premises data center model. In the on-premises model, every time a hotel chain needed more resources to serve a new group of customers, they had to wait around six months before their new servers were up and running. That's right. It takes about six months in the private sector to negotiate an agreement with the data center, obtained the necessary approvals from finance to purchase very expensive servers, ship them to the data center, set them up and start supporting workloads like reservations and bookings. It takes double that time in the public sector. The IT deployments used by the international hotel chains are called on- premises as opposed to cloud native. On-premises deployments are slow to scale with demand. They are too slow to support the massive, sustained growth velocity experienced by Airbnb and other successful startups. The on-premises model creates two more organizational phenomena. First the international hotel brands had to attract, hire, and train IT experts to perform all the work of managing their infrastructure rather than letting experienced engineers at AWS do that work for them. As the leader of a hotel chain, recruiting for IT leadership might not be the best use of your time. It would be like every law firm hiring engineers to build their own custom email system, but it's much more efficient for every law firm to buy M365 Outlook or GSuite for Gmail. However, before cloud computing, every organization had to buy this technical know-how and run their own IT infrastructure. Back then, it was simply part of the cost of doing business. The second phenomena is a strategic and cultural one. If your organization can only scale to serve new customers on a time scale of six months to a year, then you and your leadership team will naturally move slower. You will not be as attuned to opportunities for viral growth. With this mentality, you might be less likely to pursue disruptive, fast moving plays like Airbnb's founders. Now we know why AWS can scale quickly, but why can it scale infinitely? AWS originated from the retail website amazon.com. In the United States, all retail websites need to scale to meet spikes in demand on certain shopping days, such as Black Friday. Black Friday is a day after the Thanksgiving holiday and the start of the holiday gifting season. Amazon.com built an IT infrastructure robust enough to withstand these spikes in demand. Then the large retailer Target asked Amazon.com's engineers to build their own retail website. Amazon's engineers realized that they were building the same things a second time and when they discovered an issue, they'd have to fix it in two places rather than just one. So rather than building to suit each individual business, the Amazon engineers asked why not build a public cloud where any organization can run their workloads and benefit from infinite scale. And that's why they launched Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2006. Think about the superpower of immediately and infinitely scaling to meet demand. How would this apply to your organization? For example, AWS customer Intuit makes the popular TurboTax software. They use AWS' ability to scale infinitely to process tax returns, which are due on specific days of the year, especially because many taxpayers wait until the last day to file. Likewise, most startups want to cultivate rapid growth and user adoption. As Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Google observed quote, "the founders of seemingly every startup he visited, told him they were building their systems atop Amazon servers. All of a sudden, it was all Amazon." that potential for immediate and infinite scalability is the reason why customers like Airbnb, Netflix, Zoom, Uber and Twitter continue to use AWS.
