Special Podcast #15: Attila Narin, Amazon Web Services, talks cloud, startups, data centres

When Amazon launched way back in 1994, it was a way for Jeff Bezos to sell books online. And while you can still get all the best-sellers you want through the ecommerce giant, there’s so much more to it than that. In fact, one of the company’s fastest-growing divisions is Amazon Web Services (AWS) — its collection of cloud computing services. In Q4 of 2015, it brought in US$2.4-billion in revenue.

One of the major players ensuring that it maintains that kind of importance is Attila Narin, Head of Technology and Solutions Architecture at AWS EMEA.

What many people don’t know is the technology behind the company came from South Africa. Narin was one of the people who led the teams in Cape Town that built Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and many key parts of the AWS cloud are still built in South Africa.

When Narin was in Cape Town recently, Memeburn got the chance to speak to him about AWS and cloud technology in general, how startups can benefit from the kind of technology that AWS offers, and the technology behind the data centres that power AWS.