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Last Thursday’s Start-Up Seattle event put on by the Amazon Web Services Team and Medrona Venture Group was an enlightening look at the endless possibilities Amazons Web Services present to small companies. Even though I’m fairly familiar with the inner workings of Amazons Web Services – this blog is hosted on an EC2 instance, and I recently released Capazon, a Capistrano extension library to manage EC2 instances – this event shed new light on how much they mean to the internet.

Jeff Barr, Amazons Web Services Evangelist, revealed that in Amazon’s research, engineers at small web-based companies revealed that they spent only 30% of their time developing features unique to their product. The other 70% was spent doing “undifferentiated heavy lifting”: buying and configuring hardware, dealing with data centers, implementing load balancing solutions, and dealing with growth issues. With these issues being handled by Amazons Web Services, small companies are able to focus more of their time on their product’s unique features instead of repeating the work of others throughout the world.

This, in effect, shifts downward the cost of starting a new company, or cycling the improvement loop in an existing company. There’s no hardware to buy, no hard drives to swap, no data centers to visit – only time spent on the core product itself.

Andy Jassey, Amazons Web Services Senior Vice President, revealed something very interesting: Amazon is no longer offering these services with excess capacity at Amazon’s data centers, rather, they are actively purchasing new hardware dedicated to Amazons Web Services. “We’re going to scale Amazons Web Services as big as users demand”, he said in response to a question pertaining to the capacity Amazon has to offer.

I also had a great chat with Matt Garman, Amazon Web Services Product Manager, during the wine tasting after the event.

I emerged from this event with pages and pages of notes detailing how LexBlog could use Amazon Web Services for future product offerings, and even to replace a good bit of our current hardware. Events like these are few and far between, and I consider myself very lucky to have been able to attend.

Today, Lexblog took a big leap in the right direction. Our current server setup has been causing us headaches in recent months, so we decided to go with an in-house hosting solution. Two shiny Apple Xservs were ordered, shipped, and upgraded. Today, they were booted up for the first time, and with the help of Apple Remote Desktop, I’ve been configuring, updating, and generally massaging our new workhorses.

These servers don’t know what’s about to hit them: I’ve prepared a tasty cocktail of Movable Type, LightTPD, and FastCGI to power our blogs, with a sprinkling of Ruby on Rails on the top to make management of our blogs easier.

Watch out for some new features and upgrades from Lexblog in the next few months, as well as drastic speed improvements. They don’t call it FastCGI for nothing ;)