Amazon Web Services (AWS) is making the case for its cloud platform as a driver of business innovation, saying that as the cost of using its infrastructure falls, so does any risk associated with a new venture.

The firm also argues that AWS is now a mature and robust enough platform for enterprise workloads, citing some customers using its infrastructure to operate even mission-critical applications.

At the AWS Summit in London, chief technology officer Werner Vogels said the cloud platform has had a fundamental impact on how IT has evolved since it launched in 2006. He stressed the firm’s commitment to openness and value as reasons for the success of AWS.

“We do not lock you in to any type of technology. You can choose any operating system and any application; you can run them all on AWS. There is no contract to force you to be our customer for say, five years, and this means we need to be on our toes – if you not satisfied, you can just walk away,” he said.

As Amazon continues to expand, this drives economy of scale and cuts costs, which the firm passes on to customers to keep them happy, with some customers seeing a 40 percent reduction in their bills at start of 2012. But this also helps to ensure customer success, according to Vogels.

“If we can get the cost of computing down low enough that you don’t need to worry about it, then the type of new applications we can help create will be enormous. Our aim is make infrastructure so cheap that it will drive innovation,” he said.

Vogels claimed that economics rather than technology is driving cloud uptake, with customers realising that they can gain access to IT resources quickly without any purchase cost, and only pay for what they use.

“You increase innovation when the cost of failure approaches zero, and so you can stop wasting money on IT, and spend it on the things that really matter for your business – building better products,” he said.