Soocial is a service that syncs your addresses on your phone, computer and online services. Their tagline:  “A million devices, one magical address book.” Today, its chief developer, Stefan Fountain tweeted a link to a diagram sent to him by the Amazon Web Services architecture team (click image for larger view):

Designs like these are fascinating for people in this time of deep app awareness. Our intelligence has morphed. We’re conditioned to look at these diagrams, thinking of brilliant services and how they are orchestrated.  That sounds odd to some extent. But it’s true.

A few years ago it was a small community that could appreciate a diagram showing a company’s architecture on AWS. Today, the story is about speed and innovation. And the infrastructure you use determines if you are the hero or the loser. Have a cool service? Awesome! If it has crappy performance? Get ready for a hell storm.

Amazon Web Services is the darling of the cloud. It is the pioneer in developing elastic infrastructures. As Randy Bias of Cloudscaling said to me a few months ago, AWS is like one big computer. It’s secret sauce is its server architecture.

This diagram does not reveal AWS secret sauce. The magic is in the software and the networking. More so, this is an example for how a sophisticated service uses a cloud infrastructure. Hope you find it interesting, too.