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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

#91

Post by mdeeks »

adt2bt wrote: post #84
mdeeks wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Ahh you're right. Last week. Being restricted to the DS instance types is a little bit of a bummer though.

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

#92

Post by ripberge »

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…

Azure is definitely behind in some regards particularly IaaS. That was not really their strategy for quite a while and it shows. We are using their PaaS now and really like it, much better experience than we had with stuff like elastic beanstalk or cloudformation on AWS.

We still used Amazon Email and CloudSearch though. Azure has no email and Azure search is too new for me to trust.

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

#93

Post by Axsuul »

colinbartlett wrote: post #3

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 highly doubt this. Amazon's long-term strategy is to sell its infrastructure (servers, shipping, etc). This allows them to not only compete with competitors but sell pickaxes.

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

#94

Post by adventured »

chatmasta wrote: post #56
adventured wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

eBay is extremely profitable, far more so than PayPal. PayPal's margins are not particularly impressive.

PayPal however is growing much faster than the auction platform (which is hardly growing).

The old processors like Visa and Mastercard have had amazing value increases in the last ten years. Visa is now a $160 billion company with 40% net income margins. PayPayl is a very attractive target for the big four of Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Amex. That will drive up its perceived value. One of those big four is very likely to go after a merger or acquisition of PayPal after the spin-off.

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

#95

Post by mdeeks »

tracker1 wrote: post #85
mdeeks wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We only run Linux and use Macs. So powershell isn't an option for us. The SDKs for various languages aren't terribly mature either. I don't think any of them except the .NET one are 1.0 yet.

Don't get me started on the Beta UI vs normal UI. Some things are only supported in one and not the other and vice versa. I'm constantly being flipped back and forth between the two. Also they are both really unpleasant to use. I get lost a lot.

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

#96

Post by fragmede »

discodave wrote: post #80
techtivist wrote: post #68

With such slim margins AWS and the larger cloud services industry of today will become what the airlines industry has become.

The barriers for entry to Cloud are actually higher than for airlines IMO. In the long run it will become more like the utility industry (think electricity) than airlines. To get into the same cloud market as AMZN/MSFT/GOOG you are going to need: 1. Several billion dollars of Capex to get to the same scale as the incumbents. 2. A large amount of investment to replicate all the internal software that Amazon and friend…

Getting into the cloud, and getting into the cloud on the same level as Amazon, Microsoft, or Google are two different things.

Just like getting into the airline business, and getting into the airline business to compete with the likes of American Airlines, Lufthansa or United Airlines are two different things.

The same overly simplistic business plan could just as easily be applied to 'getting into Cloud', and while leasing a few business jets off Boeing has it's own page on boeing.com[1], it's still a significant expenditure.

Here's the same plan:

1. Lease a pile of servers from Dell or HP

2. Developers, Sysadmins, and other staff are highly skilled but otherwise fungible. OpenStack is rapidly maturing so you can take advantage of that.

3. Marketing, marketing, marketing. Through newer online social media channels instead and compete on price.

Airlines are famous for making only meager profits, especially considering the capex required to play.

Since Cloud is still a relatively immature industry, there's still room for niches, just like the airline industry has regional airlines. All GPU cluster anybody? Bare-metal Private Servers? Digital Ocean and Rackspace are chugging along just fine.

How about selling of Cloud services that run on top of AWS? Is that still Cloud? Dropbox famously started off just running on top of Amazon's S3, and I'd definitely call them Cloud. How about if you setup Heroku for Erlang? Scala? No billion dollars of Capex required, and I'd still definitely call Heroku a Cloud business.

Trying to compete with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, or Google without billions of dollars is tilting against windmills, but to say 'getting into cloud' requires several billion dollars at the outset is a bit of an overstatement.

[1] http://www.boeing.com/company/about-bca/startupboeing.page

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

#97

Post by dummyfellow »

ripberge wrote: post #92
mdeeks wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Azure is definitely behind in some regards particularly IaaS. That was not really their strategy for quite a while and it shows. We are using their PaaS now and really like it, much better experience than we had with stuff like elastic beanstalk or cloudformation on AWS. We still used Amazon Email and CloudSearch though. Azure has no email and Azure search is too new for me to trust.

Azure email is Office 365 / exchange online

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

#98

Post by chisleu »

tracker1 wrote: post #86
chisleu wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm no expert on that. I thought it was just managed Mysql. The google stuff scales pretty well for startups who are starting to blow up.

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

#99

Post by skuhn »

virtuallynathan wrote: post #77
trhway wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

With the photos released by Google/MSFT/FB and OpenCompute specs they are putting ~60-96 "1U equivalent" boxes per rack (each with 2x E5-2600 class CPUs). Getting datacenter densities to 25kW/rack requires a bit of extra work (Chimneys, containment, etc) but the big guys do this already. http://www.intel.co.jp/content/dam/www/public/us/en/document... covers it fairly well.

It's totally possible to get to 80 general purpose compute servers to a rack, with a power draw of around 15kW. I prefer the Supermicro FatTwin, but there are other options with similar density.

It usually isn't worth going to a mega dense rack (25kW or whatever), because unless you built the entire site with this in mind, you'll probably run out of power before you run out of space. Then you spent extra on these extreme density solutions for no real return. It can still make sense, if the entire solution is thought out.

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

#100

Post by [deleted] »

mdeeks wrote: post #95
tracker1 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We only run Linux and use Macs. So powershell isn't an option for us. The SDKs for various languages aren't terribly mature either. I don't think any of them except the .NET one are 1.0 yet. Don't get me started on the Beta UI vs normal UI. Some things are only supported in one and not the other and vice versa. I'm constantly being flipped back and forth between the two. Also they are both really unpleasant to use. I…

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