http://simonwillison.net/2026-11-11T21:18:30+00:00Simon Willison2026-11-11T21:18:30+00:002026-11-11T21:18:30+00:00https://simonwillison.net/2026/Nov/11/aws-emulator/

<p><strong><a href="https://github.com/aws/aws-emulator">aws-emulator</a></strong></p> Finally, an official emulator from AWS to run tests against a local clone of their many different services without having to provision a paid API key to do so.</p> <p>It's written in Rust by a huge swarm of agents - 29,684 commits in the first three weeks of the project. Swaminathan (Swami) Sivasubramanian wrote about <a href="https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2026/11/aws-emulator-and-the-engineers-job-when-agents-write-the-code.html">how it came to be</a> in a guest post on Werner Vogels' blog.</p> <p>It currently requires Docker to run on macOS or Windows. I'm hoping they fix that in the future - it would be great if you could download a single binary and use that as part of a standard test suite in other languages and on other platforms. <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/amazon">amazon</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/amazon-web-services">amazon-web-services</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/testing">testing</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/werner-vogels">werner-vogels</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/rust">rust</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/docker">docker</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai">generative-ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms">llms</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/agentic-engineering">agentic-engineering</a></p>

2011-01-05T15:13:00+00:002011-01-05T15:13:00+00:00https://simonwillison.net/2011/Jan/5/werner/

<blockquote cite="http://www.quora.com/How-and-why-did-Amazon-get-into-the-cloud-computing-business"><p>The excess capacity story is a myth. It was never a matter of selling excess capacity, actually within 2 months after launch AWS would have already burned through the excess Amazon.com capacity.  Amazon Web Services was always considered a business by itself, with the expectation that it could even grow as big as the Amazon.com retail operation.</p></blockquote> <p class="cite">&mdash; <a href="http://www.quora.com/How-and-why-did-Amazon-get-into-the-cloud-computing-business">Werner Vogels</a></p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/amazon">amazon</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/amazon-web-services">amazon-web-services</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ec2">ec2</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/s3">s3</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/werner-vogels">werner-vogels</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/recovered">recovered</a></p>

2007-12-20T17:59:23+00:002007-12-20T17:59:23+00:00https://simonwillison.net/2007/Dec/20/werner/

<p><strong><a href="http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/12/eventually_consistent.html">Eventually Consistent</a></strong></p> Werner Vogels explains the trade-offs involved in building scalable, highly-available data stores such as Amazon’s SimpleDB. <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/amazon">amazon</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/amazon-web-services">amazon-web-services</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/eventuallyconsistent">eventuallyconsistent</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/scaling">scaling</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/simpledb">simpledb</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/werner-vogels">werner-vogels</a></p>