Editor’s Letter, July 2017

It’s not the most masculine way to start of the editor’s letter of a men’s magazine but the other day I watched Bambi. I was watching it with my 2-year-old daughter so I have an excuse… honestly. Apart from the whole orphaned baby deer thing I was really taken with the technical execution of the film. From something that was released in the 1940s it is a spectacular work of cell animated art. Walt Disney’s team pushed the technical boundaries of the age to create something that audiences 75 years later are still captivated by. Imagine what they could create with today’s tools. As Walt Disney once said, “If you can dream it, you can do it.” The problem is, that sometimes it takes a while for our technical capabilities to match our dreams.

Sometimes, technical capabilities open more dreams. The exciting thing is that right now we are in the middle of some seriously exponential technological change. Even something like Netflix, for instance, has become almost ubiquitous. But behind all of those pretty digital movie covers is a large physical and digital system. Digital streaming is a simple concept that people were talking about in the ‘80s, but it was only thanks to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and their pipelines and storage and ability of dealing with large amounts of data that Netflix found the ability to deliver high resolution movies to your screen.

AWS came about, of course, because of the need for Amazon to deal with their own need to deal with millions of customers and their need to buy things online. This is a very simplistic overview, of course, but my point is that AWS and other cloud services are creating the potential for more and more innovation. In this issue Isaac Taylor recaps some of the highlights from the recent AWS summit, and looks at how cloud computing is becoming the bedrock of a lot more technology to come. It’s an exciting time to be alive.