Soundtrack to Mary

Wednesday:

Many miles wandering from room to room
Many trees slain just to write it to you...

"Soundtrack to Mary", Soul Coughing

Wednesday started with a test of the Emergency Viva System. My roommate had to defend a thesis with the University of Manchester, and they'd told him they were going to do it over the phone today at about mid-morning our time. What they didn't tell him was that they were going to call at 5am our time to make sure the phones worked.

So I got an early start to the day. I wrote yesterday's entry, then wandered down to the lobby to get coffee from the coffee shop (which had a sign saying "Now serving...Oatmeal and Grits". Hurl) and a free cinnamon bun from a sweet little old lady (no, really) in a hotel uniform. I met Matt and Bob the Norwegian (#6, I believe), where we discussed:

• Bumblebee tuna (holy crap, that's creepy)
• Free Enterprise
• Gummi Bear theme songs (Bob the Norwegian has 8 different languages on his music player, and more at home)
• And this exchange:

Matt: That's it, I give up. I've got eye cancer.

Bob the Norwegian: You've got eye cancer? You're crazy.

Me: ...said the guy with the 8 versions of the Gummi Bear theme song on his music player...

Bob the Norwegian: 8 languages. I have more versions than that at home. Want to hear the ska version?

Me: ...so you're in no position to throw the crazy brick around this room.

And then it was...opening time! As it happened I grabbed a seat right up at the front, and noticed Dr. Werner Vogel, CTO of Amazon.com, standing at the wall a couple feet to my left checking his email and waiting to give the keynote speech. "Oh...hello. I thought you'd be wearing a suit." "Nah." Jeans, Harley-Davidson t-shirt, denim long-sleeved shirt untucked.

Highlights from Adam Moskovitz' speech (he's the organizer):

• David Blank-Edelman got the SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award
• 815 attendees, and probably more what with late registrations
• 35% of papers submitted were accepted

Very quick speech; he knows his stuff.

And then it was the keynote. Dr. Vogel was talking about Amazon Web Services. This was interesting and entertaining and fascinating and all kinds of good gubbins. Highlights:

• Hanging out in the bar (missed this, dammit) w/LISA attendees; when he told them his original speech, they said "No, no, no! Tell us why Amazon is doing cloud stuff. Isn't it a book store?"
• "I sometimes introduced myself as the sysadmin for a large bookstore. But that would be disrespectful here; your job is a lot harder than mine." (Flattery will get you everywhere.)
• "Cloud computing is not my favourite term these days, because it includes almost anything...especially stuff that fails."
• "By now, we've learned that if major business magazines say Jeff Bezos is crazy, we're good."
• "For the first five years, Jeff's motto was 'Get big fast.' That's not a motto you should give to your engineers."
• "For some reason we put data centres near trailer parks. And trailer parks attract tornadoes."

He gave the example of Animoto, which is a startup that figured out how to detect rhythm and melody changes in music. They use it to automatically generate slideshows using slides submitted by users, or grabbed from their Flickr album. They offer a 30-second snippet, and then you can pay $x.95 to get the full version.

He showed one that used photos of him at a conference, and I forget what the music was but it was very disco-y and made the thing jaw-dropping, both because of the cheese and because the thing was utterly, completely addictive.

He showed a graph of their orders; it was climbing slowly from April 16th through the 18th, and then they released a Facebook app on April 19th. The app would grab pictures from a photo album, compose the slideshow, then notify all the user's friends that they had something cool to watch.

The graph went exponential. They had 25,000 customers signing up per hour. Their conversion rate is astonishingly high, because they ensured that the slideshow was available in 5 minutes or less.

And they own no servers at all: it's all done with Amazon virtual machines. They went from using 50 machines to a peak of 3500. "They're just a bunch of guys in New York with laptops; they use Amazon as their server park. Can you imagine going to VCs and saying, 'Give us $5 million 'cos we're going to release a Facebook app'?"

I thought it was really, really well done and interesting -- aside from one pretty noticeable hiccup. However, others disagreed. The USENIX summary is here. When the recordings/slides are up, I'll post a link.