Mr. Bezos, moreover, has become a proponent of kaizen, which means “continuous improvement” in Japanese…

For Amazon and Mr. Bezos, that balance has always been there. Experiments were encouraged, then the results measured. This combination of loose thinking and tight analysis seems to be very productive.

NYTimes: Curious at Amazon, but Not Idle

This seems a powerful combination. Solid metrics can be eye opening, but they can also stifle innovation. Cultivating a positive, failure friendly environment is key.

The New York Times used 100 Amazon EC2 instances and a Hadoop application to process 4TB of raw image TIFF data (stored in S3) into 1.1 million finished PDFs in the space of 24 hours at a computation cost of about $240 (not including bandwidth).

NY Times: Self-service, Prorated Super Computing Fun!

The project was so easy, and so cheap, that the developers ran the process a second time after noticing  a minute error. Just another example of how cloud computing is changing the game.

I’m in the process of writing a tutorial on how to get up and running: Cloud Web Hosting: AWS