Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

The fact that you didn't have to go get a $10 million purchase requisition put in place to go buy something.

Any developer could put in a credit card and spin up an EC2 instance in an afternoon.

I think there's going to be that similar set of pressure for companies who are saying, I don't want to pay you $30 million in Percy licenses or here's what I'd like to see.

There's also going to be significant pressure on these companies to add capabilities.

Yeah, I mean, for sure.

I think the DuckDB experience was always very nice to run on a laptop, right? Or to basically, if you wanted to run like an EDL pipeline, let's say, on an EC2 machine, DuckDB was a great tool.

But I think at least with the original .db file format, there was this sort of limitation around one writer grabbing the log over the file and then no readers can connect to it.

And I think that is not a limitation, of course, if you're running .db in your laptop, but it is a limitation if you want to share a dark db storage with a broader audience quack indeed is something that solves this problem right but then that means of course that you go into the client server kind of architecture i think sqlite does this a little bit different where even on a On a single machine with a single file, you can still have writers and readers at the same time.

I mean, so the nice thing about it being DuckDB is it's extremely simple to use, right? So if you want to try it out, you'd go to a terminal, you'd basically type install quack, load quack, and then the next thing that you do is you call a function called quack serve, and that will already spin up a server for you, right? And then from another terminal client, you could just go in, connect to this specific address in your local host, and then you already have a client server protocol working.

Which, if you compare it to, again, traditional systems like Postgres, is extremely simple.

And obviously, in a more production-grade scenario, you host these on EC2, and then maybe you need something like a load manager on top of that, because also a nice thing about Quag is it runs on modern HTTP.

uh https so it's also very nice you don't need to reinvent a protocol yourself on top of tcp it's just plain old http um so yeah i think it's it's relatively simple to still get something up and running on uh on the cloud and getting to work uh yeah it's a it's a very nice foundation i think for a client server architecture

But it is in a wave of advancement in quantum computing.

And last but not least, because I do think it impacts a lot of the conversations we're having today, in December at Amazon's reInvent conference, they talk about Graviton2, which was custom ARM processors for workloads in EC2.

They're promising 40% better price performance.

Up until this point, for the most part, the cloud had been... regular machines bought from you know with intel and amd chips and so forth bought by the big vendors already pre-racked and so forth but now the cloud companies amazon being one but also microsoft and google as well google was already going into their tensor flows and things like that are starting to build their own hardware to optimize for cloud workloads and that's going to change things going forward

Now, what did this mean for Amazon? Well, Amazon's engineers carved the technology into discrete services.

There was a service called S3, which is the way that Amazon stored data, and another service called EC2 for compute processing.

Each one worked simply and reliably.

So whether you wanted to build a new feature for adding product listings, or if you wanted to compute a new recommendation algorithm or store a user's purchase history, you had the core fundamental building blocks to build a highly scalable e-commerce website or any web-based application.