SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE is pretty thrilled to be covering the AWS Summit 2013 this year, considering the growing focus on the IaaS space. Ariel Kelman (@akelman), Head of Worldwide Marketing at AWS, was the first guest to stop by theCUBE and talk with Wikibon founder and show host Dave Vellante about Amazon’s philosophy, and why AWS has been so successful.  In their brief sit down, here is a great little nugget Kelman gave: Amazon’s commitment to passing along any gain in margins it gets to its clients is not a gimmick. That is, and always has been a goal of Amazon and AWS.

AWS holds a dozen summit conferences like this a year to “deliver educational content.” With 12-16 breakout sessions, all conference attendes can go to as many as the choose, free of charge. Technical executives, CIOs, developers and other conference attendees run the gamut of IT-focused professions. A common misconception of AWS is that it is only for test and dev workloads. Kelman alluded that, while these workloads are very popular among clients, by no means are they the dominate workload AWS sees. Oracle, Sharepoint, SAP – any workload is supported in the AWS cloud.

Cloud-native applications are another piece of the AWS cloud, and he shared a noteworthy example. Many of you are familiar with the Washington Post’s social reader app for Facebook. The app was so popular in fact, that the Washington Post moved the social reader app to it’s own standalone website and off of Facebook’s platform.

Security & pricing

Kelman was also very adamant in his focus on the topic of security being important to AWS. Security, operational performance, and integration of security tools are all places of specific focus for AWS.

AWS’s pricing is modeled around its customers to satisfy a broad set of users. From Glacier, its fastest-growing service in terms of customers, to RedShift, its overall fastest-growing service offering, AWS is blazing a trail in cloud computing. Redshift identified that data warehouse is quite the pain point when it comes to hardware/software infrastructure. But here’s a business proposition: enabling new business processes while adding value beyond just moving workloads…and saving the customer money.  Removing the infrastructure burden between your ideas and what you want to do. By reducing the cost of failure next to zero, more ideas can be attacked in a MVP (minimal viable product) ecosystem.

Before he left theCUBE set, Vellante asked him what, if anything, worried him when it came to the cloud?

The most important thing we can’t forget is keep our fingers on the pulse of the customers. Also, help them figure out what they want next. We have to help them figure out what they need to do with the cloud next…

AWS.  With it’s fingers on the pulse of its customers and a dedication to iterate and evolve…it’d sure be a tough horse to bet against.