Running a business at the scale of Amazon, we often have to solve
problems that no other company has faced before. The disadvantage of
this is that there is no “how to” guide for us—a lot is unknown.
However, the advantage is that when we solve a new problem, it’s an
opportunity to reinvent our services and create new benefits for our
customers. Indeed, we have created some of our most innovative and
successful ideas when we have entered unchartered territory.
When you’re a customer-centric company, you often find yourself in the
great unknown because customers will always want more and better. You
will need to invent on their behalf. A great example of this approach to
innovation and problem solving is the creation of the AWS Nitro
System, the
underlying platform for our EC2 instances.
After years of optimizing traditional virtualization systems to the
limit, we knew we had to make a dramatic change in the architecture if
we were going to continue to increase performance and security for our
customers. This realization forced us to rethink everything and became
the spark for our creating the Nitro System, the first infrastructure
platform to offload virtualization functions to dedicated hardware and
software. Now, with the Nitro System, we can offer the best price
performance in the cloud, the most secure environment, and a faster pace
of innovation.