Werner Vogels, CTO—who just came back from India where he was at Amazon Development Center—starts with an interplanetary vision of happy flying people that buy books.

Massive is defined as billions (world population < neurons in a brain < stars in a galaxy < galaxies in the Universe < ants in  the world—one quadrillion!) He enlists various technologies that are enablers for large scale. There are also social enablers for scale (anything that gives people instant access to sex, food and money). Talking of scale current Amazon's scale is of 32 items ordered per second. And it works now through their implementation of solid and smart systems engineering.

Biological systems could be a model to use in order to achieve scale: redundancy, feedback loops, modularity, loose coupling, purging, apoptosis, spatial compartmentalization, distributed processing, extended phenotype. (After that slide I just started to imagine a meeting between Werner and Jeff Bezos, that should be interesting.)

He suggests Epidemic Theory of Infectuous Diseases (which by the way is nowhere to be found on Amazon) as late night reading. The power of epidemics can serve as a model for robust distributed systems. Epidemics turn scale into advantage. His point is that at algorithm and protocol levels epidemics are a good approach to manage state.

Conclusion slide

• The customer is the only thing that counts

• Question your assumptions

• Learn from Chaos

• Let go of control

• Turn scale into advantage