Amazon Finally Discloses Cloud Services Sales, Showing 49% Jump • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by nickbauman » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 11:07 PM UTC

jread wrote: post #39

nickbauman wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spoke with a Google channel lead who said Google's cloud is 5x the size of Amazon's. The policy is not to talk about it publicly because Google itself uses its own cloud tremendously and the 5x size was not something customers necessarily utilize.

He may be comparing Google's total data center capacity (search, cloud, etc.) to AWS. I do monthly scraping to track cloud marketshare for Alexa 10k and Fortune 500. From that analysis, EC2 is at 12-14% marketshare compared to http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2015/03/compute-marketshare-ale...

Where is the other 84% going?

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

#52

Post by adwf » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 11:07 PM UTC

justincormack wrote: post #15

brianobush wrote: post #11

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 IPO'd, Bezos would be under humungous pressure to give it all out as dividends. Given his business beliefs, it'll never happen. It's not like they have cashflow problems anyway.

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

#53

Post by mooreds » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 11:08 PM UTC

discodave wrote: post #29

gshakir wrote: 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.

I would say that having a couple of billion annually to invest in cloud infrastructure and the economies of scale that it enables is a pretty big barrier to entry. At the moment the only realistic challengers to AWS are Microsoft and Google.

Rackspace?

And what ever happened to Eucalyptus? https://www.eucalyptus.com/

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

#54

Post by devy » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 11:10 PM UTC

hobofan wrote: post #37

devy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the basis of your argument that Google Cloud is better? My personal experience has been exactly the opposite - AWS is light years ahead of Google Cloud. Does Google Cloud provide Machine Learning service? For the longest time, it was only supporting Java and Python SDKs. And the Google's API is still very much lacking in terms of features and stacks. In fact the better support and much comprehensive services p…

> Does Google Cloud provide Machine Learning service? Yes they do. [0] > And this is common, as we've just seen people complain about Google Cloud 4 days ago. To me, this is an isolated incident. On the other hand, seemingly every AWS customer of non-trivial size had to reboot a significant part of their machines in the last year because of Xen vulnerabilities (with no way to predict if you will land on a patched mac…

Ah, great. Apparently I didn't know they do. But again, being first doesn't automatically mean it's better. For instance, Sun's grid computing concept was earlier.

> To me, this is an isolated incident.

http://www.davidmturner.com/2013/07/26/gce-io-performance-su...

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

#55

Post by derefr » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 11:11 PM UTC

nickbauman wrote: post #48

discodave wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most analysts seem to think that AWS is way bigger than Google's public cloud. That channel lead may well be right in terms of total number of servers or MW of datacenter capacity. BUT scale is not the only thing that the cloud brings. AWS is not just S3 and EC2. I think it's pretty clear that Amazon is much further along the road of productizing their cloud. i.e. providing all the products that businesses and most n…

Published information I have dug up shows Google's cloud is larger, but only by 50% and the dates were in the 2012-2013 range. Regardless of whether the channel lead's motivations are to say one thing or another, he did say something that struck me with conviction: "We're not going anywhere. We're NOT relinquishing this market." My experience with Kubernetes and Managed VMs and as an App Engine dev since 2009 compare…

I wouldn't so much phrase it as "Amazon is targeting the present"; they're executing a hybrid strategy of making future-stuff to entice you (Lambda, or DynamoDB way back when) and then also cutting away all the objections you (some enterprise CTO) could have to moving 100% to their cloud stack, by making it also capable of doing everything your current private LAN/VPS/colo stack already does—even if everything your current stack already does is brain-damaged legacy stuff.

In other words, Google is building a cloud that you can only really pick up for blue-ocean ventures. AWS gives you a bunch of the same tech, but also a clear transition path: you can first duplicate all your present-day infrastructure in their cloud with little-to-no service interruption, and then start replacing it, component-wise, with the future-tech.

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

#56

Post by chatmasta » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 11:13 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #49

icpmacdo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the advantage to spinning it off to its own company?

You do that when the value inside the company is being perpetually vastly under-represented (combined with shareholders applying a lot of pressure to unlock, say, a stagnant stock price). For example, if AWS is worth $100 billion in ten years, and Amazon as a whole is only being valued at $150 billion in the public market at the time. Separate the two might be worth $100 billion each at that point. The argument for e…

Amazon is losing money as a whole, but AWS Is profitable. Isn't that the same concept as PayPal hiding in ebay?

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

#57

Post by primigenus » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 11:15 PM UTC

devy wrote: post #32

hobofan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, Google is ahead of AWS in most aspects besides access control. GCE instances vs. EC2: faster boot times, better network, a far better pricing model for startups (no upfront cost and year-long lock-in to possibly outdated instance types). Yes, Amazon offers a bigger variety of products, but the newer ones just scream vendor lock-in without much-added benefit. Why would I use Opsworks if Chef or Ansible…

What's the basis of your argument that Google Cloud is better? My personal experience has been exactly the opposite - AWS is light years ahead of Google Cloud. Does Google Cloud provide Machine Learning service? For the longest time, it was only supporting Java and Python SDKs. And the Google's API is still very much lacking in terms of features and stacks. In fact the better support and much comprehensive services p…

> For the longest time, it was only supporting Java and Python SDKs.

You are describing Google App Engine circa 2010. I recommend taking another critical look at what Google has available because it's quite competitive these days :)

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

#58

Post by chatmasta » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 11:16 PM UTC

"These have since become common building blocks of Internet-based computing systems, supporting companies ranging from large enterprises like Infor US Inc. and Netflix Inc. to startups such as Instacart Inc."

When I see a brand name mentioned randomly in an arricle, I wonder who paid for it. Why would Bloomberg mention instacart specifically? Is it common practice for companies to pay for these subtle pseudo-mentions in articles?

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

#59

Post by hobofan » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 11:17 PM UTC

devy wrote: post #54

hobofan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does Google Cloud provide Machine Learning service? Yes they do. [0] > And this is common, as we've just seen people complain about Google Cloud 4 days ago. To me, this is an isolated incident. On the other hand, seemingly every AWS customer of non-trivial size had to reboot a significant part of their machines in the last year because of Xen vulnerabilities (with no way to predict if you will land on a patched mac…

Ah, great. Apparently I didn't know they do. But again, being first doesn't automatically mean it's better. For instance, Sun's grid computing concept was earlier. > To me, this is an isolated incident. http://www.davidmturner.com/2013/07/26/gce-io-performance-su...

That's a 2 year old blog post from the time when GCE was still in beta.

Apart from that, noisy neighbors happen on any cloud platform, and as the author of the article said, those test were far from scientific.

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

#60

Post by dorfsmay » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 11:23 PM UTC

hobofan wrote: post #22

rifung wrote: 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…

In my opinion, Google is ahead of AWS in most aspects besides access control. GCE instances vs. EC2: faster boot times, better network, a far better pricing model for startups (no upfront cost and year-long lock-in to possibly outdated instance types). Yes, Amazon offers a bigger variety of products, but the newer ones just scream vendor lock-in without much-added benefit. Why would I use Opsworks if Chef or Ansible…

Why pick google?

Choose anything, except maybe object storage, and there is somebody out there who does it better than Amazon, there is also sombody who does it cheaper than Amazon.

Except for S3, AWS isn't the best at anything, nor the cheapest, but, they are the only ones doing it all, and typically the ones inovating new services. Nobody has all the services AWS has, or even as well integrated, or as granular etc...

If you have very specific needs, then go pick and choose from different vendors (assuming you're ok with multi-site latency), but if you're starting a company and have generic needs that aren't well defined yet, AWS is probably your best bet to start with. People do that, and once their invested so much time in learning the environement, they stick to it.