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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

#101
post #65
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…

ON the other hand, Azure's PaaS offerings are way better than AWS's. No surprise there, since Azure started with PaaS and AWS started with IaaS.

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

#102
post #78
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…

SSDs, okay. That's something that's legitimately difficult to scale, particularly if you've invested heavily on spinning disks and made assumptions about their performance/reliability. I get that. But no TLS termination? At a company that has invested $15bn on their cloud products and has in-house expertise on the actual source code of one of the most widely-used networking stacks? That's... surprising, to say the le…

What does the lack of SSL termination mean? We are running many services in Azure which we access using TLS1.2 via the loaf balancer so what would SSL termination add to this?

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

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But still get worse performance than bare metal (noisy neighbors, inconsistent EBS performance, intra-instance network latency). Disclaimer: DevOps for AWS and bare metal infrastructure.

Sure, virtualized OS' are always going to have some overhead vs. bare metal.

My understanding is that the OS virtualization is actually a relatively minor part of the difference.

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

#104
5 billion dollars a year. That is pretty impressive.

Compared that to a company like Google that can't make any money at all off their infrastructure except with search ads[1] :-) That is the real story for me. And a tiny bit personal because when I was there I didn't feel that platforms got nearly the respect they deserved for keeping the roads rolling.

Congratulations to the Amazon team, that is an impressive feat indeed.

[1] http://investor.google.com/earnings/2015/Q1_google_earnings....

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

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"""1. Lease a pile of servers from Dell or HP

You already lost the game. The entire point of cloud computing is you don't need any of the features that Dell and HP heap onto their servers. Every port, every button, every LED costs you another couple hundred mW.

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

#107
post #41

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"?

Easy! We'll just run our cloud service on AWS!

With superior software giving you higher utilization of the real server, you could theoretically turn a profit by reselling AWS capacity at prices cheaper than what AWS itself charges.

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

#108
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...

That article doesn't support your point, except perhaps for IBM and it's hazy to me what exactly that revenue is. It's certainly not from the type of developer-targeted infrastructure services that AWS is.

As for Microsoft, quoting directly from your link: "One person has told Business Insider that Azure revenue is at $1 billion lifetime since its debut in 2011, but is accelerating quickly."

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

#109

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?

Everything the AWS all-hands, Andy will mention that AWS would be as big as the retail. Andy is not a man who jokes often.

Then I do not believe Jeff wants it to leave the Amazon family.

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

#110

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?

Everything the AWS all-hands, Andy will mention that AWS would be as big as the retail. Andy is not a man who jokes often.

Then I do not believe Jeff wants it to leave the Amazon family.

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