At the AWS 2019 Technical Summit, Zhang Wenyi, President of Amazon China, AWS Global Vice President and Executive Director of Greater China, stated when introducing AWS that AWS is the cloud for technology leaders, launching multiple new services and features every year to meet customer needs. In 2018 alone, AWS launched 1,957 new services and features. It's clear that Amazon has become the dominant cloud platform for good reasons.

Despite Amazon's dominant position, it has strong competitors, with Azure and Google Cloud being among the leaders. They not only compete with AWS on commodity products but actually do quite well. However, Amazon has maintained its position as the global public cloud leader through continuous technological advancement.

So what technologies make AWS invincible? In 2018, Info World published Peter Wayner's paper: "11 ways AWS beats Azure and Google Cloud," which discussed 11 ways AWS beats Azure and Google Cloud. As a cloud practitioner, I am more interested in the 8 service products mentioned in the article, so I have selected them to introduce to you.

1. EC2 SPOT Instances

If you want a new instance and want it now, AWS offers a list price. But if you want to spend as little as possible and the work isn't urgent, you can bid on Amazon's SPOT market, where prices fluctuate based on demand. Yes, this is a bit painful - you have to ensure a high enough bid, but if you're willing to invest time, you can rest assured you'll get the market clearing price. Other cloud providers offer discounts for high-volume use, but Amazon lets the market find the true bottom. Late at night during the holidays, prices might be lower than ever, and your application will benefit greatly from SPOT.

2. Amazon Aurora

For programmers, Amazon Aurora looks just like MySQL or PostgreSQL. You can choose your syntax, and underneath, Aurora stores data in a fast, SSD-based virtual storage layer. This in itself is a clever idea that lets programmers use their preferred open-source SQL version.

Even more amazing, Aurora distributes your data across multiple machines in multiple regions. Your data is spread across hundreds of storage nodes in three different regions to ensure reliability and access speed. Now, Aurora can execute parallel queries on all storage nodes to speed up access, sometimes very fast.

3. AWS Cost Explorer

Cloud has become so popular that many third-party vendors offer tools to audit and optimize AWS usage. They'll browse your cloud inventory and cut enough accumulated fat each month to justify their existence. Amazon realized how complex this has become, and the company is pushing for newer and better interfaces to understand billing. AWS Cost Explorer provides a dashboard that tracks your past usage and even attempts to predict your future bills.

4. Snowmobile

If "big" in "big data" means close to 100PB for you, then the internet is not your choice for moving data. For sending an email or even uploading a zip file with just a few megabytes of data, it might work fine, but the backbone isn't suitable for moving some huge datasets because they're too large.

Amazon launched Snowmobile because, in terms of bandwidth, nothing beats a shipping container full of disk drives. Amazon will drive the Snowmobile to your data center so you can start importing data at local network speeds. When it's full, Amazon will take it to data centers across the country, tracking its movement with GPS to ensure it doesn't get lost. At the other end, it will import the information into S3 or Glacier.

If you only need to move about 1PB, Amazon also makes a smaller box called "Snowball," which the company will ship to you just like the box full of books, clothes, or other things you bought from Amazon.

5. Free Game Engine

Are you developing a game? You can sign a contract with a famous independent game engine or choose Amazon's own Lumberyard, a free game engine. If this sounds too good to be true, Amazon answered your doubts in Lumberyard's FAQ: "We make money when you use other AWS services to power your game." In other words, you only pay when your users show up and start adding load to AWS machines. It's not clear if this is a good deal because costs are hidden in the per-millisecond machine time charges, but you can reasonably argue that you need server time anyway.

6. AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda started as a cute idea - a simple shell script that could glue together all operations in the cloud. Users quickly turned to Lambda's serverless functions to handle occasional computing tasks because it was much more efficient than allocating a machine for occasionally arriving work. It could be a background process that runs once a night, an infrequently used corner of your microservices architecture, or just a blog full of your complaints that hasn't found its audience yet.

Eventually, people realized that Lambda is ideal for more complex background processing, especially those that run occasionally. If the server sits idle longer than it works, switching to serverless mode can save a lot of money. If your processing is sporadic, Lambda might be the cheapest way to host some important jobs in the cloud.

7. Alexa for Business

Alexa is an interesting toy. It's a great gift, especially for those who aren't tech-savvy. Alexa provides users with a natural and intuitive way to interact with the technology they use every day. Alexa Skills create personalized experiences and allow Alexa to perform more functions, with tens of thousands of skills now available to users. Alexa for Business provides various tools for users to manage Alexa devices at work, register users, and distribute skills at scale.

Amazon has been building office management infrastructure, such as booking conference rooms. Even tech-savvy people will appreciate giving commands rather than trying to find the right URL and log in to get the right permissions to do anything. Alexa for Business will be your quiet office assistant, listening to everything you say in the office.

8. Browser-based Development

While Amazon continues to support command-line development that many developers still prefer, it's also exploring ways to transform browsers into an IDE for the AWS cloud. Amazon purchased Cloud9, a browser-based code editor, and placed it in a tool cluster to manage the deployment of all the code you write with it. When you build Lambda functions, you can execute them directly in the browser without downloading anything. There are also so-called "no-code" options, like the GraphQL API builder, which lets you build APIs with just a few clicks. Soon you'll be able to do almost everything in the browser while watching cat videos.

Are these products interesting? AWS services always feel fresh, and continuous innovation injects vitality into AWS, which is the main reason it maintains its undefeated position. This is also the main reason we keep learning about AWS. Have you started to become interested too?