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Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

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121–130 of 410 posts

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#121

> “Tactics like this are bad for business and customers,” Because Amazon's tactics aren't bad for business or consumers?

Great source of reviews, incredible convenience, massive selection of goods, huge value for membership (Amazon Instant Video included), free 2-day delivery, reasonable pricing, consumer-friendly customer service, yes, it's a nightmare? This is one of those things where you are going to have to explain to consumers why they should be outraged in order for them to realize how awful it is. By most measures, Amazon is on…

Amazon Logistics is dreadful, a parcel may turn up at 8am, 1pm, 9pm or whenever they feel like it. As a consumer, where do I get it delivered to? Work? Home?

If you don't want Prime (I have no use for it), it's now £20 minimum for free (Amazon Logistics) delivery.

Price-wise they're not even that much cheaper in the UK

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#122
post #54

Is this because they actively want to discourage any revenue going Amazon's way from Wal-Mart related business activities, or because they don't trust Amazon not to look at the data hosted on their platform? If the latter, then I think that's just extreme paranoia. If there was ANY evidence of Amazon doing that it would destroy everyones trust in AWS and I suspect people wouldn't be able to move away fast enough (Whi…

I think it's harsh to call it extreme paranoia. I've heard that one of the reasons Amazon won't use Slack for its chat is because it isn't self-hosted. I'm sure many major companies won't use Gmail. I don't think Slack or Google have done anything that suggests they'd mine their platforms for corporate espionage. Slack isn't even in the same industry as Amazon. Is Amazon paranoid? According to the article, Walmart se…

The story there is more complicated, and security plays a large part of it.

1) Slack uses AWS. While it's perfectly possible to operate without slack, chat services are valuable during outages. The kind of incident where it would be most valuable is precisely the kind of incident that would take it down. Communication services must be completely independent of the AWS infrastructure. Likewise, something like PagerDuty is effectively off limits. Though they've done a good job building resilience, PagerDuty have been affected by AWS outages.

2) Slack communication isn't encrypted end to end. While it may be stored encrypted at rest, it is stored in a method they can decrypt, read and analyse (inherent in the features they provide). Chat is filled with critical operational information, and (no matter how well you train people) passwords and other critically sensitive information. There's always an extremely slim chance that a rogue actor could choose to access information they shouldn't. That information is, also, potentially accessible to someone who might hack in and compromise the service. We've already seen Atlassian's hosted HipChat service compromised and some chats leaked. Slack has, arguably, an even bigger bullseye painted on it. (fun thought exercise: what damage could a malicious actor with access to yours slack channel do with your chat ops bots? How long would it take to stop them?)

3) feeding on from 2, to some degree, you don't control the security of hosted solutions. Audit compliance is a checklist game, it is perfectly possible to check every point on those checklists and still be inherently insecure. If you're even remotely paranoid, you've got to assume that anything you don't host will be compromised, and weigh up the risks associated, against the value and necessity of the service. Leaking operational information is a big, big risk. Amazon's security sets a high bar for paranoia. They are determined to never have a New York Times front page article "Amazon hack, credit card information stolen", or similar.

There's just no strong value in them switching to Slack, just a whole mass of unnecessary risks.

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#123
post #82
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, sounds almost like competition when you put it that way.

The idea that competition is some kind of holy grail which we must as a society aspire to maintain, I think, is very narrow minded and suffering from tunnel vision.

You don't have to see competition as some sort of "holy grail" in order to perceive it as almost invariably better than its absence (from a consumer perspective) in a market economy.

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#124

If Wal-Mart decrees this, put up or shut up. Welcome to business. CEO Diktats about using not using competitor services for anything whatsoever, are as old as Microsoft. Wal-mart is not in the cloud business, so I can only wonder if, as others have commented, it is about data security in AWS domain, since Wal-Mart's main competitor is Amazon. We know what Google and Facebook get up to with peoples data, why would Ama…

It's actually older than Microsoft. Just saying.

Sliced bread didn't seem appropriate. Especially not in these Gluten intolerant times. :p

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree totally. I would find it hard to believe, that large well financed companies, with some of the most technically capable staff on the planet, would have the restraint to not peek.

It's not just a matter of restraint. Large, well-financed companies can also afford to put some of their most capable staff on internal security.

True, but also a fairly recent Yahoo/email access incident, is a case in point where people decided to circumvent the entire security staff.

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall a story about one vendor deciding it would be more profitable to separate from Wal-Mart and take the declining sales hit versus the dictated profit margin. I believe it was a lawn mower company?

Snapper mowers. https://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart

Interesting read, though it would appear that's no longer the case: https://www.walmart.com/search/?query=Snapper&cat_id=5428_11...

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#127
post #76

Is this because they actively want to discourage any revenue going Amazon's way from Wal-Mart related business activities, or because they don't trust Amazon not to look at the data hosted on their platform? If the latter, then I think that's just extreme paranoia. If there was ANY evidence of Amazon doing that it would destroy everyones trust in AWS and I suspect people wouldn't be able to move away fast enough (Whi…

My guess is that they know that Amazon is using AWS profits to fund losses in the ecommerce business. If they can get some large retailers off AWS, that might reduce Amazon's ability to pour cash into ecommerce and hurt their margins. It seems that a lot of people forget that Wal-Mart dwarfs Amazon in sales volume for companies like Procter and Gamble so probably have more leverage over them than most think.

But retail-oriented companies are just a percentage of the global market. I don't think Walmart really has the power it thinks it has. As a distributor, I'm sure they know very well how to bully their supply chain, they are used to being the biggest fish in their pond; but in the grand scheme of things, from an AWS perspective, that supply chain is not that massive. Every company doing business with Walmart could drop AWS tomorrow (if they even use it today, which is not a given, considering that their core businesses are likely not internet-first) and AWS would probably survive. Retail and manufacturing are just two sectors, there are plenty more.

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snapper mowers. https://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart

Interesting read, though it would appear that's no longer the case: https://www.walmart.com/search/?query=Snapper&cat_id=5428_11...

Threads like this give me hope for this website. Thanks' to everyone for excellent morning reading.

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#129
post #101

This is... Not the best? That Wal-Mart is powerful enough to dictate the internal business practice and tech decisions of it's vendor. On the other hand, Amazon is a massive immoral monster devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year. It's rapidly approaching a "too big to be allowed to fail" status, and that's awful for Americans. Since anti-trust laws weren't written by a ge…

> That Wal-Mart is powerful enough to dictate the internal business practice and tech decisions of it's vendor. Wal-Mart is pretty infamous for squeezing suppliers & vendors on price and operating procedures. Hard.

"It also is not unheard of for Wal-Mart to demand to examine the private financial records of a supplier, and to insist that its margins are too high and must be cut."

https://www.fastcompany.com/47593/wal-mart-you-dont-know

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great source of reviews, incredible convenience, massive selection of goods, huge value for membership (Amazon Instant Video included), free 2-day delivery, reasonable pricing, consumer-friendly customer service, yes, it's a nightmare? This is one of those things where you are going to have to explain to consumers why they should be outraged in order for them to realize how awful it is. By most measures, Amazon is on…

Amazon Logistics is dreadful, a parcel may turn up at 8am, 1pm, 9pm or whenever they feel like it. As a consumer, where do I get it delivered to? Work? Home? If you don't want Prime (I have no use for it), it's now £20 minimum for free (Amazon Logistics) delivery. Price-wise they're not even that much cheaper in the UK

That's the best retort you've got? Sounds like Amazon is killing it.
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