With access to books, movies, and other media, Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet may look like another consumer toy. However, an important part of the product, an advanced Web browser, is at the heart of where business computing is going.
The new Amazon browser, called Silk, seems to be the first of its kind built for the world of cloud computing, which uses the Internet to gain access to the extensive computing power in data centers. Silk takes into consideration both the computing power in the user’s device and the computing power in Amazon’s enormous data centers, then executes tasks for maximum efficiency.
As Peter Vosshall, a Distinguished Engineer at Amazon, says in a video that Amazon released Wednesday, “it is split between what runs on your device and what runs in the cloud.”
One early advantage of this product is likely to be fewer “handshakes,” or short identification steps, between the device and the Internet. After an initial signal, the authentication happens within Amazon’s powerful computers, which move signals faster than can travel through a wireless network. Templates used in the format of Web pages can also be preloaded, so things pop up faster.
Longer term, Silk will monitor consumer behavior, and Amazon’s machines will predict from past behavior where a customer is likely to go next. If you often move from reading, say, The New York Times’s front page to the Bits blog, Amazon computers will request that page ahead of time and have it preloaded for when you do make that move.
All this is possible now in part because Silk is only inside the Fire tablet, and connects to Amazon’s cloud. But in learning how better to manage cloud tasks — a little computing here in the hand, a lot of computing up there in the cloud — Amazon is gaining precious skills in newer forms of computer science brought on by the cloud era. For a long time, most programming problems were defined by how much processing power you had. That’s why you used to hear so much about powerful chips and now you don’t. With the advent of the cloud, the amount of processing power for most problems isn’t the issue; correctly apportioning tasks and making millions of servers work together is.
It is easy to see Amazon taking these skills into the corporate world. It became an early leader in cloud computing by modifying its own in-house computing and storage systems for other companies. The Silk team is already advertising jobs in fields like distributed systems and security, which will be critical areas for increasing the capabilities of Silk beyond delivering media to things like sales data analysis.