Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

foxbusiness.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 410 posts

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

#331

Post by FmrAMZN_TA »

phil21 wrote: post #304
hbosch wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly doubt this. It would be extremely careless by Amazon to jeopardize their insanely-successful, industry-leading profit-machine with something so reckless.

I didn't even think this was debateable any longer. It absolutely happens on their retail side. I don't think anyone will have a confirmed example of it happening to AWS customers - but if they are completely willing to destroy smaller vendors on the retail side with their own branded products, I can't imagine them saying AWS is where they draw the ethics line in the sand. You could make a case for Netflix being an e…

You are correct. They ABSOLUTELY monitor customer spend usage, without using one iota of personally identifiable information.

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

#332

Post by notyourwork »

vvanders wrote: post #311
__d__ wrote: post #220

I sold to Walmart for 4 years. In the beginning we believed we were lucky to become vendors. Then we realized how much stress they created. Every single year they would short pay our invoices. We would have to submit a claim with Walmart accounting. This process was completely and utterly time consuming. But the worst of it, they wouldn't pay the invoices owed until a year later. It's hard to float a $100,000 short p…

I've seen Game Publishers do this with milestone payments but for a different effect. One of the common clauses is that the publisher gets all assets(source code, art, etc) in the case of a studio folding. They then intentionally delay milestone payments about 3/4 of the way though the project, watch the company fold(since that's the highest-burn part of the project) and then re-hire 2/3rds of the existing staff who…

These types of practices make me sad for humanity.

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

#333

Post by tomsthumb »

stephenhuey wrote: post #242
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wal-Mart have always been pure bastards to their supply chain. My family had a small manufacturing business that went bankrupt years ago. At one point we were making a part that ultimately ended up on a WM product. Periodically WM's folks would come around and do a strong arm routine trying to renegotiate the contract. It got bad enough my dad adopted the habit of bringing a couple of the very burly folks that worked…

Someone close to me related the story of when they almost put one of their products in Wal-Mart's stores in Canada about 2 decades ago. One big showstopper was that they were asking for the quality to be reduced so that the price could be lower. The vendor I know refused, saying that their product lasts a long time and they are proud of it and they wouldn't sign unless that stipulation was removed. A few months later…

There's a great writeup on a company that experience similar:

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

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

#334

Post by clhodapp »

cookiecaper wrote: post #243
__d__ wrote: post #220

I sold to Walmart for 4 years. In the beginning we believed we were lucky to become vendors. Then we realized how much stress they created. Every single year they would short pay our invoices. We would have to submit a claim with Walmart accounting. This process was completely and utterly time consuming. But the worst of it, they wouldn't pay the invoices owed until a year later. It's hard to float a $100,000 short p…

I've never worked with Walmart directly, but to be fair, I experienced this kind of thing all the time as a contractor. It seems to be sort of an unspoken thing in accounting departments that you allow vendors to complain before you pay too much attention to the particularities of any given invoice. It doesn't excuse the practice and I always appreciated the clients who paid correctly and promptly, but I don't think…

If ever there were a use case for a lawsuit punitive damages, some poor company that is driven out of business by a well-documented case of this would be it. I know I'm being naive here but I feel that it should be clear to anyone with a sense of propriety that the big company should have to pay the liquidation cost for the small one!

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

#335

Post by gshulegaard »

FmrAMZN_TA wrote: post #330
gshulegaard wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question, I apologize if it's stupid... But how do you guarantee encryption at all stages such that Amazon cannot snoop it when you have to do final mile encryption on hardware controlled by Amazon? I mean encryption for messenger services where each end is not controlled by a third-party is one thing...but how do you guarantee the third-party in control of the hardware responsible for performing the encryptio…

You can't (and they don't promise) encryption such that AWS can't see everything, if they were in fact malicious. This is true of every cloud. That said, it's not illegal for them to see that xxx vendor increased their storage costs/bandwidth costs by $yyy every month, and that you could look into it - without using one piece of encrypted data. Disclosure: Former AWS

Thanks for the reply! Pretty much what I thought...just wasn't sure if the original comment knew of some process I wasn't familiar with that obviated my belief.

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

#336

Post by dkarapetyan »

Spivak wrote: post #162
dkarapetyan wrote: post #159

This is how you know you've lost. When you are more obsessed with what your competition is doing than worrying about what you're doing.

Would you be willing to host your critical infrastructure on your direct competitors platform? Wouldn't you be worried about them pulling the rug out from under you?

Nope.

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

#337

Post by anth1988 »

johnflan wrote: post #316
randcraw wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few points in refutation. I see Amazon as far ahead of Walmart in all ways that promise growth: 1) Walmart may be the biggest retailer in the US, but they don't have half of the US homes as subscribers. Amazon Prime does. I doubt Walmart.com attracts any where near as many e-tail visitors as Amazon, and I suspect the gap is widening. 2) Amazon is decades ahead of Walmart in the online shopper experience. I grit my…

Walmart also launched jet.com

acquired, not launched.

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

#339

Post by Johnny555 »

CaptSpify wrote: post #325
Johnny555 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That only gives them the data that's in-flight and already decrypted for processing, but any security conscious company will have their data segmented into many sections that are broken up into smaller pieces with their contents encrypted separately with a decryption key that's stored in a hardware HSM. If they want to capture the entire data stream, they'll need to capture it in real-time.

A) I think you way overestimate the security practices of most companies. I have no knowledge of WM's practices. B) That's likely still going to be a large amount of very usable data

Having worked at a bank that was moving some workloads to the cloud, I don't think I'm underestimating the security practices of companies that consider their company data to be valuable.

In the application I was working on, they had over a TB of data, broken up into 32MB blocks, each with a unique key that had to be unwrapped by the HSM. If you stole the VM you'd get only a few blocks of readable data with it.

I assume that if Walmart values this data, they'll take similar precautions in the cloud.

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

#340

Post by bookmarkacc »

chiph wrote: post #97
nargella wrote: post #39

Years ago I read The Wal-Mart Effect. Basically it was a whole slew of industries that Walmart had dramatically affected. Things like forcing vendors to manufacture in China and building a crazy infrastructure to get 'fresh' Salmon imported from Chile. I got the impression they would turn the screws on industries to get cost savings via scale. This move seems odd.

FastCompany had an article back in 2003 about the Vlasic gallon jar of pickles. Sales to Walmart quickly eclipsed all their other channels. And then Walmart said "We want you to lower your price." > For many suppliers, though, the only thing worse than doing business with Wal-Mart may be not doing business with Wal-Mart. https://www.fastcompany.com/47593/wal-mart-you-dont-know

Great article. I wish they supported their thesis that shopping at Walmart is a self harming cycle that exports jobs. Maybe by focusing on small towns.
Post reply on HN