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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

#111

Post by gabbo »

discodave wrote: post #79
nickbauman wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think derefr replied to your first two paragraphs nicely. "We're not going anywhere. We're NOT relinquishing this market." I think for a while some didn't believe how serious Google was about the whole selling cloud services thing. Now they do. Regarding Google and Amazon's disparate profitability: 1) Cash is arguably more important than profitability from an investment financing perspective. Amazon and Google are…

Amazon makes extensive use of capital leases support their expansion. In 2014 they were roughly on par with their other capex (in the $4B-5B range, don't remember exact number), except that their capital leases don't deduct from Amazon's free cash flow. If you subtract those out, the FCF situation ends up looking quite a bit worse.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/2743335-understanding-how-am... and http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/02/04/amazon-just... discuss the mechanics.

They're sort of taking on a bunch of debt (or things that look like debt) and downplaying it with clever accounting. In the current market environment I don't know that it's really a problem (they just borrowed $6B via a bond issue, for example). Just an interesting reality for a company competing with two cash-rich rivals in a hugely capital-intensive space.

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

#112

Post by aleem »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #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…

It's even more impressive when you consider his statement:

> “Amazon Web Services is a $5 billion business and still growing fast -- in fact it’s accelerating,”

I take that to mean that the business is growing but the rate of growth is also growing (hence "accelerating"; I like how he puts it so succinctly).

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

#113

Post by Kurtz79 »

MovingWorlds wrote: post #27

Interesting to see the after hour stock price jump.... https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AAMZN&ei=HXA5VcnWBY...

Especially if you hold some shares :)

I thought that the potential profits of cloud business were already being factored in the current evaluation, but apparently it was more profitable than the analysts (which were probably imagining the same thin margins as the retail business) expected.

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

#114

Post by CoreySanders »

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…

Yes, the Cloud Services grouping around IaaS VMs wasn't a good idea and is awkward. You can blame me for that. :) Stay tuned next week. We may have some solace for you.

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

#115

Post by onewaystreet »

mattzito wrote: post #64
mblevin wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's an interesting question because many more well know startups use AWS (Airbnb, Pinterest, Etsy, Spotify). Amazon has a webpage specifically to highlight them: http://aws.amazon.com/start-ups/. It's hard to imagine that Instacart would be the startup that would be offered as an example by Amazon or the reporter's network. It wouldn't surprise me if reporter was friends with the founders.

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

#116

Post by growthape »

I believe this happened because companies like http://www.cloudways.com/en/ are integrating Amazon cloud infrastructure smartly to build a service for application developers.

Usually, application developers are not good at server side configurations. They want something that's easy to setup and help them deploy their applications like WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Joomla etc.

Companies like Cloudways are taking away a lot of pain and giving those application developers a chance to easily setup their apps with premium support.

Don't you think that's attractive? and a business opportunity as well.

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

#117

Post by timoth »

chisleu wrote: post #98
tracker1 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Assuming you're both talking about Google Cloud SQL and AWS RDS, then with RDS you can actually choose between MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, or Amazon Aurora which is supposed to be compatible with MySQL 5.6. Google Cloud SQL only seems to mention MySQL.

For scalability, RDS gives you up to 3TB storage (1TB for SQL Server, 64TB for Aurora) and DB instances with up to 244GB RAM, 32 vCPUs and 10Gigabit network, whereas it looks like Google Cloud SQL is 100GB and 16GB of RAM. It looks like Cloud SQL provides managed replication/failover as standard; with AWS this is optional, but simple to set up. (I use RDS; never tried Google Cloud SQL.)

(I have no connection with either company, beyond being a customer.)

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

#118

Post by tim333 »

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.

It would be hard to mandate as how would you define a business unit? If amazon just sold books would fiction and non fiction count as different units or do book sales and electrical? There a different ways you can slice a business.

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

#119

Post by getsat »

growthape wrote: post #116

I believe this happened because companies like http://www.cloudways.com/en/ are integrating Amazon cloud infrastructure smartly to build a service for application developers. Usually, application developers are not good at server side configurations. They want something that's easy to setup and help them deploy their applications like WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Joomla etc. Companies like Cloudways are taking away a…

Shillways. Your comment history is amusing.

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

#120

Post by turingbook »

aleem wrote: post #112
ChuckMcM wrote: post #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…

It's even more impressive when you consider his statement: > “Amazon Web Services is a $5 billion business and still growing fast -- in fact it’s accelerating,” I take that to mean that the business is growing but the rate of growth is also growing (hence "accelerating"; I like how he puts it so succinctly).

The rate is not growing: 2015Q1 49%, 2014Q1 69%.
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