Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Finally Discloses Cloud Services Sales, Showing 49% Jump

bloomberg.com

11–20 of 141 posts

Re: Amazon Finally Discloses Cloud Services Sales, Showing 49% Jump

#11

Is there any chance that Amazon might spin off AWS to a separate company? Or would that be suicide to the stock price of their retail business?

Seems that they are using AWS profits to fund other parts of the business. I would guess that would negate any benefits to a spinoff.

Re: Amazon Finally Discloses Cloud Services Sales, Showing 49% Jump

#12
post #5

I don't think the growth will accelerate as the article claims as the barrier to entry is becoming less and less each day. It should be interesting to see how it plays out.

There are HUGE barriers to entry. What is the reason behind the "barrier to entry is becoming less and less each day"?

Not parent but I'd guess they are talking about OpenStack but if they are they are wrong. Running a data center is no easy or cheap task. Sure you might have SOME of the logistics cut out for you using OpenStack but the barriers to entry are still VERY high.

Re: Amazon Finally Discloses Cloud Services Sales, Showing 49% Jump

#13
post #6

"Since its inception, Amazon has refined and expanded AWS while competitors including Microsoft and Google have tried to replicate its success with similar projects. Those companies have only recently started to deliver basic services on par with Amazon’s." Is this really true? I know that AWS offers many more services than competitors currently, but for the services for which there is a competing product, is the AWS…

> is the AWS offering really that much better? Depends on your needs, tbh, traditional hosting is a better fit for mine. I can automate buying and provisioning bare metal servers already. I don't need AWS for that.

Thats not the question.

Yes, AWS is way ahead of the other cloud providers in every way.

Re: Amazon Finally Discloses Cloud Services Sales, Showing 49% Jump

#14
in the style of Drake equation: $1.5B/quarter, supposedly 1/3 of it is billed CPU time, at $1/hour per one 1U computer, at 500 hours billed per quarter per computer we have 1M computers - at 40 boxes per rack we have 25K racks, at 50 racks/row it would be 500 rows, at 50 rows per "warehouse" it will be 10 "warehouses". The storage money and racks i'd suppose is comparable to CPU boxes in numbers. So in result it would be 10 "warehouses" of 50 rows of 100 racks.

Re: Amazon Finally Discloses Cloud Services Sales, Showing 49% Jump

#15

Is there any chance that Amazon might spin off AWS to a separate company? Or would that be suicide to the stock price of their retail business?

Seems that they are using AWS profits to fund other parts of the business. I would guess that would negate any benefits to a spinoff.

No, they could get billions to fund the rest of the business with by selling it. It would be a huge IPO. Potentially wirth more than the profits.

Re: Amazon Finally Discloses Cloud Services Sales, Showing 49% Jump

#16

Is there any chance that Amazon might spin off AWS to a separate company? Or would that be suicide to the stock price of their retail business?

I doubt it, AWS wills be one of the few profitable bright spots in amazons earnings calls. Clearly they're interested in developing it further and making it a key part of their business. Generally companies spin of areas if it's outside of their core business.

Re: Amazon Finally Discloses Cloud Services Sales, Showing 49% Jump

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems that they are using AWS profits to fund other parts of the business. I would guess that would negate any benefits to a spinoff.

No, they could get billions to fund the rest of the business with by selling it. It would be a huge IPO. Potentially wirth more than the profits.

If they spin it off, it likely wouldn't IPO, Amazon would be the only stock holder. All profits from AWS are already factored into Amazon's stock price, another IPO would be unnecessary

Re: Amazon Finally Discloses Cloud Services Sales, Showing 49% Jump

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are HUGE barriers to entry. What is the reason behind the "barrier to entry is becoming less and less each day"?

Not parent but I'd guess they are talking about OpenStack but if they are they are wrong. Running a data center is no easy or cheap task. Sure you might have SOME of the logistics cut out for you using OpenStack but the barriers to entry are still VERY high.

The datacenters is also just part of it. All that software is itself part of the deal. That said, people could build competing services to some AWS products right on top of AWS' own services...

Re: Amazon Finally Discloses Cloud Services Sales, Showing 49% Jump

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is the AWS offering really that much better? Depends on your needs, tbh, traditional hosting is a better fit for mine. I can automate buying and provisioning bare metal servers already. I don't need AWS for that.

Thats not the question. Yes, AWS is way ahead of the other cloud providers in every way.

Care to elaborate? It seems like you know the answer to my question =]

For example, how is EC2 much better than GCE, if it is. (I realize you didn't imply that it was; this comparison just seems the most interesting to me)

Post reply on HN