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Amazon Finally Discloses Cloud Services Sales, Showing 49% Jump

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

#81

Post by csears »

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boot times, better network, a far better pricing model for startups (no upfront cost and year-long lock-in to possibly outdated instance types).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

I will agree that Google mostly has higher quality infrastructure, but faster boot times and lower latency networking aren't what most cloud consumers care about.

AWS has been diligently moving up the stack, creating higher level services that are "good enough" for many of their customers, who are increasingly enterprises teams who want to outsource as much as possible to Amazon. They can go all-in with AWS and expect a constant stream of new features and services at relatively competitive prices.

With Google, their cloud platform still feels non-core to their business and they have a history of retiring services when their priorities change. I hope Google and Microsoft become fully viable alternatives, but for now, enterprises seem more comfortable betting on AWS.

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

#82

Post by jpatokal »

nickbauman wrote: post #51
jread wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Presumably they're hosting directly instead of using third-party cloud services.

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

#83

Post by allworknoplay »

Jesus, I'm occasionally amazed at GAAP for not requiring breakout of a business unit as large as $6 billion (last quarter obviously somewhat less) simply because the overall company is comparatively large; especially so when the profitability of the unit is so different from the overall company. Seems fucking material to me.

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

#84

Post by adt2bt »

mdeeks wrote: post #65
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…

One note: Azure SSD backed Storage is now GA.

http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/04/16/azure-premium-sto...

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

#85

Post by tracker1 »

mdeeks wrote: post #65
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…

If you're controlling your azure account through the powershell interface, it's a little better... a lot of things require the beta UI, which isn't so great.

That said, I was able to setup a quick little proof of concept web/worker app with node pretty quickly... though you should be aware it is running in a windows host (either 32 or 64bit configurable)... you can include exe/dll's in your package as needed too... I used a git endpoint for deploy, and that worked pretty well. There's apparently a build environment suitable and configured for node_gyp to be able to use.

Though imho it's not as flushed out as App Engine, or bits of AWS... I am able to run dokku on a few hosts... Work's account finally came online for the SSD preview about a month ago... it's definitely worth it.

There's some mishmash of availability... I kind of like that using blob storage, tables and azure queues is as simple as having a storage account... though the node client is a little lacking in documentation and examples.

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

#86

Post by tracker1 »

chisleu wrote: post #36
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…

Yep. Google hasn't met any of my needs when I play with it. I always end up back on AWS. Lambda is a stunning system IMHO. I do like Google's new DB. It is like an easy to use spark w/ cassandra backend, all behind the scenes. Very nice.

Lambda looks awesome... I'm tethered to Azure, so the closest I get is Azure App Service which works, but not as elegantly... Dokku-alt is working pretty well (testing now) as a deployment system... was looking kubernetes and the like, but it's overkill for my needs.

Doesn't Amazon's mysql api fronted db work similar to google's?

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

#87

Post by late2part »

trhway wrote: post #73
late2part wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> SuperMicro sells a 2U machine with 4 full sized computers in it with 6 drives. You can put 12 cores in that i don't think AMZN or Google put 4 sockets per 1 U. While obviously it is possible, it would be pretty dense for normally powered chips. My understanding is that 2 socket/1U is more typical. At 100W/chip it would be a difference between 8KW and 16KW heat from a rack. But anyway, you're right - AMZN probably g…

Please don't mistake my engagement for dismay. I enjoy your analysis.

>> SuperMicro sells a 2U machine with 4 full sized computers in it with 6 drives.

>You can put 12 cores in that

In fact, the quad node contains 4 motherboards. Each motherboard supports 2 processors. So that's 8 processors in 2U, or 4 processors per U.

Each E5-2600 processor could support 8 'real' cores, or 16 Amazon Virtual cores. 4 * 16 = 64 Amazon cores in 1RU.

I agree that our math won't be right, and I think you're in the ballpark. But, the densities can be 'hella' higher than one things with modern gear. It's only 70W for the 8 core processor at 1.8ghz, 135W for the 2.9Ghz version, so if we do 4 processors per rack unit, that's "only" 540W per rack unit. 60 Rack units is 32KW/RU - which is a lot but not impossible. I'm gently simplifying by assuming 0 watts for the rest of the chassis, which is approximately reasonable if you're building a CPU farm.

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

#88

Post by serve_yay »

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…

> When I see a brand name mentioned randomly in an arricle, I wonder who paid for it.

Yes, much of HN seems to think this is an insightful practice. That's all I have to say about that.

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

#89

Post by Lightbody »

Consider that their revenue is about the same as what Salesforce (CRM) will likely report (based on analyst estimates). This is pretty impressive:

  - Q1 2015 revenue: $1.57B (AWS) vs ~$1.5B (CRM)
  - Q1 2014 revenue: $1.05B vs $1.23B
  - Q1 YoY change: 49% vs ~22%
  - Q1 2015 operating income: 16.9% vs (~3%)
  - Q1 2014 operating income: 23.3% vs (4.5%)
Basically for all the talk that Amazon is a low-margin, commodity business that will never make money, their AWS business at least is doing really well.

I'm not taking anything away from Salesforce, it just happens to be a similarly sized comparison that most people thinks is a pretty good business. When compared, AWS looks pretty great!

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

#90

Post by adventured »

allworknoplay wrote: post #83

Jesus, I'm occasionally amazed at GAAP for not requiring breakout of a business unit as large as $6 billion (last quarter obviously somewhat less) simply because the overall company is comparatively large; especially so when the profitability of the unit is so different from the overall company. Seems fucking material to me.

I believe that's why Amazon went ahead with it. If you don't run into SEC requirements, you run into aggressive shareholders that will cause you legal problems trying to force you to reveal the value of such an enterprise. Suddenly Carl Icahn is breathing down your neck trying to get you to reveal that info, so they can judge if it should be spun off. The shareholder risk becomes immense the larger a business like that gets without breaking out any financial information on it.
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