Today we have our third speaker, Julien Simon, Principal Technical Evangelist at Amazon Web Services. So Julien, thank you for coming to Lviv, to Lviv IT Arena, and I would love to ask you the very first question about your experience and how you got where you are right now? Wow, that's a long story. So first of all, thank you very much for having me here. It's always a pleasure to be in Ukraine, and this is a really good event. I had a good time. Unfortunately, I have to go.
So basically, I'm a software engineer. That's where I started. I worked in the telecom industry for a number of years and then moved into the web, ending up being a CTO and VP of engineering in startups for over 10 years. Buying tons of infrastructure, servers, routers, etc., and having fun along the way, but also learning that sometimes there's a limit to that way of doing things. I started using AWS around 2012 and realized this was what I wanted to do. As I learned more about AWS, I became a customer, worked for a couple of companies using AWS, helped migrate some data centers to AWS, and then realized that's the part of my job I actually liked best. So I joined AWS about two years ago, and it's been a fun ride.
So you were already familiar with the product, you fell in love with it, and now you are an evangelist for it. Yeah, exactly. I think it's interesting to have done things this way, to have been a customer first and to have used a lot of physical infrastructure first because I know the pain points. I know what it means for a company to procure, deploy, and maintain physical infrastructure. I've been there, day and night, fixing stuff, etc., so I know the issues. I also ran a migration from physical infrastructure to AWS, so I know the challenges. In a nutshell, I can use my previous experience to give people real-life examples, not just random ones, on the issues we had and how we solved them, and maybe how they can use the same tactics to improve their agility and innovation pace.
So, you're telling your personal stories, which resonate with your potential or existing customers, and you're saying, "Hey, I'm the guy who used it for a long time." But I wanted to ask you, who are the people working with Amazon Web Services? As I know, the business model has pretty different layers of customers. Can you elaborate on this, please?
Actually, it's pretty much every kind of company. Today, we have millions of customers all over the world, and I met some of them here and want to thank them again for using us. It goes from individual developers running their websites or just learning about AWS to startups, small and medium businesses, large enterprises, public sectors, governments, and every possible industry. It's not just retail, telecom, or airlines; it's all kinds of businesses. By listening to all these customers of all sizes and industries, we build services that are useful to the largest number. I think that's one of the strengths of AWS: so many different customers help us build reliable solutions that fit almost any company.
If you're building for almost everyone, did you select the strategy of customizing the solution or standardizing the solution?
The number one principle of Amazon is customer obsession, which comes from Amazon retail. Jeff Bezos wants to build the best possible e-commerce website with the widest selection and the best prices because that's what people want. We at AWS have the same focus. We listen to what customers want, and if a large number of customers ask us to build a service based on open-source technology but make it more secure, scalable, and highly available, we'll do that. If they want us to build something completely new, we'll do that too. An example is the serverless architecture we built with AWS Lambda, which is a new way to build and deploy applications. We start from the customer, listen to them, and use their feedback to build a roadmap. Over 90% of the roadmap comes strictly from customer feedback. We love negative feedback because it helps us build better products and improve.
When you talk about listening to customers, do you do it through focus groups, personal interviews, etc.?
Actually, I would say AWS is a feedback machine. Every single AWS employee can send feedback to the product team, and we encourage everyone to do it. We engage with our customers all the time, and every meeting, every discussion, provides feedback on what they like or don't like, what's missing. We collect all this feedback and send it through our internal tools to the product teams, who classify everything and use it to build a roadmap. Over 90% of the roadmap is strictly from customer feedback, and the remaining few percent is reading between the lines. Every day, every week, I get feedback from customers and input it into our system, and eventually, it becomes a product.
Can I consider Amazon Web Services as a highly user-oriented product, in terms of user experience?
Yes, it's customer first. When you build a website, an e-commerce website, it's clear what you should do. For us, we know what people care about: security, simplicity, high availability, and a large selection of services. We try to deliver all of that. Security always comes first, and we try to build the widest set of services that will work for the widest number of customers. They combine these services in many different ways, which I call the Lego infrastructure. We have almost a hundred services now, so we give you the box, and you can assemble them in many different ways to save time, innovate faster, and focus on your own innovation and customers. It's not key to your business to run a very large NoSQL cluster at scale; it's key to have good performance and reliability. We provide managed services to do this, so you can save months of architecture and development time, and they will scale.
Scalability is a great feature of your product. Yes, scalability is important, even for small companies. Many startups can start very small, and some grow faster than they ever thought. This is a dangerous period because they have to grow 10x or double their customers every week or month. They can't afford to stop and rebuild their platform to scale. A lot of startups crash because they don't manage this switch well, and we help them do that. Customers won't return if the site isn't working. They might come back once or twice, but not three times.
How do you outbeat competitors? Amazon Web Services is very famous, but it has competitors.
Sure, we have competition, and I have a lot of respect for those companies and their products. I try to keep an eye on that. But generally, 99.9% of my time is spent with customers, helping them out or presenting. We believe that if we do the best job possible with our customers, then competition is not so much of a problem. Don't worry about your competition; worry about your customers. Listen to them, listen to the negative feedback, and introduce whatever they need. For example, we announced a couple of weeks ago that we're moving to per-second billing, and we were the first to announce it in the industry. One of our competitors announced the same thing yesterday or the day before, and that's great. Competition drives costs and prices down, and we love competition, but we love our customers even more. We set the market trends, and others follow because we listen to our customers and respond to their needs.
What is the next feature customers really want that is not yet in the product development pipeline?
That's a tough one. We have our annual conference, Reinvent, in Las Vegas in about two months, where we announce most of the new stuff. It's difficult for me to give you any actual information here. However, we see some trends that are important. Serverless is a key thing, and I see a lot of customers adopting it and building complete solutions and platforms that are fully serverless. I think it's reasonable to expect we will continue to bring new features to them. AI is also important, and it's reasonable to expect we will help customers with this. Last year, we delivered over 1,000 new features, which is about three every day. If you follow the AWS Twitter account or our blog, you'll see new stuff coming out every day. It's challenging even for me to keep up, and sometimes customers ask me about features that came out the day before, and I don't know about them. We keep moving very fast because we have so many diverse customers asking for a lot of stuff, and we try to do as much as we can.
How many people are working on AWS?
A large number. I can't give you exact numbers, but we have several thousand open positions. If you're interested, go to Amazon.jobs. We have jobs worldwide in sales, R&D, and everywhere. If you'd like to join us and help build the most customer-centric company, Amazon.jobs is the place to go.
And the last question: here we have a lot of engineers watching. Maybe you can tell them an inspiring phrase or some wisdom?
I've been working in IT for over 20 years, and it's been a great trip. I'm looking forward to the next 20 years. The only advice I can give is to learn, learn, and learn. It doesn't matter if you're fresh out of school or have 20 years of experience. The minute you stop learning, you're in trouble. The pace of IT innovation is so quick that you need to keep up. Look at what really matters and what is less important. Keep learning and investing in yourself, even just to stay informed about what's going on, like AI, deep learning, IoT. You can learn a lot with minimal resources, like buying a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino. Try new languages and platforms. If you've never looked at AWS or the cloud, you should. Keep learning every single day, and that's how you build a successful career. The minute you stop learning, disaster happens.
Thank you so much, and we will be learning a lot. People in Ukraine are really learning a lot, so thank you very much.
Thank you, and thanks again for having me. I'll be back in Ukraine later this year for another conference in Kiev, and I'm looking forward to it. Every time I come here, it's a great welcome, and the tech community in Ukraine and Eastern Europe is fantastic. Keep going, and we'll keep visiting you. It's my pleasure. Thank you very much. Thanks.