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Amazon Finally Discloses Cloud Services Sales, Showing 49% Jump

bloomberg.com

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

#61

Post by mblevin »

chatmasta wrote: post #58

"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…

Not paid directly - it's a combination of 1) brands being top of mind 2) what people / robots will recognize and ever so likely potentially to share or what will have the tiniest bit of extra SEO juice.

#1 only comes from a lot of ongoing PR outreach, coffee chats, briefings, etc - which takes time and $$$$ usually via an agency working nonstop on developing relationships to keep a brand top of mind for side mentions like this and to be at the top of the rolodex when a reporter needs a quote or some help understanding an industry or technology space.

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

#62

Post by jstoiko »

chatmasta wrote: post #58

"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…

You just did the same thing :)

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

#63

Post by miles932 »

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boot times, better network, a far better pricing model for startups (no upfront cost and year-long lock-in to possibly outdated instance types).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…

Uhm, yes, yes we do. https://cloud.google.com/prediction/docs

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

#64

Post by mattzito »

mblevin wrote: post #61
chatmasta wrote: post #58

"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…

Not paid directly - it's a combination of 1) brands being top of mind 2) what people / robots will recognize and ever so likely potentially to share or what will have the tiniest bit of extra SEO juice. #1 only comes from a lot of ongoing PR outreach, coffee chats, briefings, etc - which takes time and $$$$ usually via an agency working nonstop on developing relationships to keep a brand top of mind for side mentions…

It's also entirely possible that the reporter either asked AWS for some customer names and cherry-picked those, or the reporter asked their network for some names. In my experience, it's not paid other than in really shady non-mainstream media sites.

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

#65

Post by mdeeks »

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…

Compared to Azure, yes. The IaaS offering on Azure has many, many limitations. It is also very difficult to use. There is no general pool of servers. You have to cram VMs into these groupings called "Cloud Services" which are limited to 50 VMs each. No support for TLS termination on their load balancers. SSDs are currently a "preview" feature and only work on a subset of hardware types.

In all fairness AWS had a 4-5 year head start on Azure. Also there are a lot of really exciting things coming down the line for Azure. I don't expect this gap to last long.

Competition is good!

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

#67

Post by cthalupa »

mooreds wrote: post #53
discodave wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Past numbers had SoftLayer as larger than Rackspace prior to the IBM acquisition. I imagine with the massive growth there post merger, the distance between Rackspace and SoftLayer IBM has only grown larger. That's probably the larger omission than Rackspace.

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

#69

Post by nullrouted »

akg_67 wrote: post #66

This article shows relative "cloud" revenues numbers between Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and Google. In this context, Amazon doesn't look that big. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/official-amazon-strongest-clou...

Pretty unfair comparison in that article. Microsoft including Office 365 and Dynamics in that number totally masks Azure revenue. It would be a more fair comparison to see AWS vs Azure vs GCC.

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

#70

Post by late2part »

trhway wrote: post #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 woul…

I like your approach, and have some thoughts relevant. What's a computer? The $1/hour revenue is generated by AWS from FAR less than 1U. SuperMicro sells a 2U machine with 4 full sized computers in it with 6 drives. You can put 12 cores in that, and an AWS 'ECU' core is a hyperthreaded core. So, in the Supermicro "quadnode" [1] version you get 4 * 12 * 2 = 96 cores in 2U, or 48 cores per U. An AWS computer/instance that costs $1/hour is a "m2.4xlarge" [2] which has 8 cores. So you can sell 6 "Computers" per U with this math.

[1] http://mezz.ixsystems.com/servers/families/?family=Gemini4 [2] http://www.ec2instances.info/

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