Bezos talks in annual letter about specialized databases and AWS

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, writes a letter to shareholders every year. This year, he is mainly talking about Amazon Web Services (AWS) and databases, reports ZDNet. “Much of what we build at AWS is based on what we hear from customers,” said the CEO in his letter.

“It is important to ask customers what they want, to listen carefully to their answers and to come up with a plan to deliver it well and quickly,” continues Bezos. “No company can do well without such an obsession with its customers. But it’s not enough. The most important things are things that customers don’t know they have to ask for. We have to invent things for them.”

According to Bezos, AWS as a whole is an example of this. “Nobody asked for AWS,” he says. “Turns out the world was actually ready for a service like AWS, but didn’t know. We had a suspicion, followed our curiosity, took the required financial risks and started to build, experiment and iterate countless times.”

Databases

Bezos further explains that the company is optimistic about specialized databases for specialized workloads. “In the past twenty to thirty years, companies have been running most of their workloads on relational databases. The datasets were often small enough and the acceptable query was just long enough for it to work, according to the CEO.

Now, however, things are different. “Many applications store large amounts of data – terabytes and petabytes. And the requirements for apps have changed. Modern applications provide a demand for low latency, real-time processing and the ability to process millions of questions per second.”

Therefore, specialized databases for specific workloads – such as Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Timestream and Amazon Quantum Ledger Database – could be the future. “The right tool for the right task saves money and brings your product to market faster.”