Amazon is trying hard to be a global leader in technology and services more than the established global technical giants. From what we know amazon as giant e-commerce provider to technology provider is a huge transformation. Looking backwards there is a lot to learn from where it all started and where they are aiming towards.
Future is IoT
While trying to connect the dots on the technology evolution at amazon it gave me a realization that they were more focused on their sub goals to achieve their bigger goal – IoT.
From time to time, on any of the products they launched they were more focused on the below –
1) Data to and from the customer
2) End user experience
3) Seamless scalable architecture
4) Always available
5) Inbuilt Intelligence
6) Security and many more
Solutions to address internal problem
All that are mentioned above are the demands that are raised as part of the amazon core business – eCommerce. What amazon did for their internal maintenance and growth helped them bring external revenues. This also helped them diversify their portfolio from just selling the products to selling platforms and services.
From a learning perspective, this transformation also gives an opportunity to understand the focus areas of a developer/consultant/technical geek/etc. We might be working on similar Google or Microsoft related products but might not know the whole picture on how every element is connected.
Amazon itself is an example to realize this technology evolution. Highlighted below are the major breakthroughs for the company or rather their evolution so far.
AWS – In the early 2000’s amazon was finding difficult to expand their infrastructure for scalability. That made them realize expose a common API that was scrambled across individual teams. This lead to developing something like AWS internally to address their own needs. This gave them lead to start amazon web services. They were early to introduce cloud based services much ahead of others.
Currently AWS holds more than 40 percent of the market share in the cloud computing services.
Other alternatives – Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure
Amazon Echo Series – Voice User Interface(VUI) for the emerging IoT ecosystem
1) Voice as one more medium of data collection – Smart phones are major medium of data collection. Now with amazon echo, voice is an another medium that is completely different from touch interface. Unlike touch interface where user has to be engaged with mobile device echo utilizes voice. This medium also gives a broader way of data collection like a free form rather than forceful data the user may select from what is shown on the mobile device. Currently amazon might not know on how to provide proactive information using echo. However, the input from this medium can be utilized to enhance the shopping experience at amazon mobile app or website.
2) A new interface other than UI is needed to control IoT devices – Emerging IoT trends force us to move from controlling the IoT devices using mobile based touch interface to interface-less interface. In the near future, voice might not need any hardware device to interact to the actual IoT device.
Other alternatives – Google Home
Amazon Go – Amazon’s latest experiment in retail shopping is an example of IoT. Amazon provides varieties of products like Greengrass, Lambda running at edge, Device management,etc to easily manage your IoT solutions. Together with voice and cloud computing services apart from the IoT platform being offered you can achieve ‘IoT device-Edge-Cloud computing model’.
Other alternatives – Raspberry PI with sensors to do prototypes, Android things
All these technologies are so crucial to be a part of developing IoT infrastructure. We might not master in all but we always have a freedom to choose to be a part of this technology revolution.
Shankar's Blog 