Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Finally Discloses Cloud Services Sales, Showing 49% Jump

bloomberg.com

121–130 of 141 posts

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

#121
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Wikipedia is short and to the point on this one

> An SSL termination proxy is a proxy server that is used by an institution to handle incoming SSL connections, decrypting the SSL and passing on the unencrypted request to the institution's other servers (it is assumed that the institution's own network is secure so the user's session data does not need to be encrypted on that part of the link). SSL termination proxies are used to reduce the load on the main servers by offloading the cryptographic processing to another machine, and to support servers that do not support SSL, like Varnish.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSL_termination_proxy

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

#122
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."

IBM owns Softlayer in addition to internally developed services.

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

#123
post #32
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…

Nobody seriously uses AWS ML service, do they? This is the worst idea ever unless it's just to see how well it works, because you have very little control over the algorithms/model parameters.

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

#124
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…

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.

I beg to disagree. As I wrote in another thread, Microsoft has not one but two Platform-as-a-Service offerings:

- Azure Cloud Services (PaaS)

- Azure Websites (PaaS light)

Unfortunately, when I last looked at it four months ago, both of them were quite unattractive, at least for Python hosting.

First of all, they have no support for automatically installing python dependencies, i.e. no support for pip. If you want to install e.g. django-rest-framework, you have to install it locally and then manually copy the installed files to Azure (with FTP, if I remember correctly).

Secondly, they both run Python on a Windows Server running behind the IIS web server. Besides the fact that you will walk along the road less travelled (Django is overwhelmingly deployed on Linux), there is a very concrete limitation: if you want to install binary packages (e.g. PIL or Pillow), you have to manually compile them for Windows (and of course copy them manually to your Azure server). Yuck.

If you want to use Azure, go with their IaaS offering (Azure Virtual Machines) and stay away from their PaaS offerings

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

#125
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.

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

Revenue 2013: $1000 Revenue 2014: $1690 (+ $690) Revenue 2015: $2518 (+ $828)

With those figures you could still argue that growth (in terms of extra revenue per year) is accelerating.

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

#126

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?

Who the heck would buy it? Google? Microsoft? IBM? That would be hilarious.

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

#127

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 busines…

It also means Amazon has massive room to shrink margin to stay competitive.

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

#128
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> “Amazon Web Services is a $5 billion business and still growing fast -- in fact it’s accelerating, Revenue 2013: $1000 Revenue 2014: $1690 (+ $690) Revenue 2015: $2518 (+ $828) With those figures you could still argue that growth (in terms of extra revenue per year) is accelerating.

Still even more impressive is AWS keeps dropping prices year after year and has impressive revenue growth.

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

#129
post #98

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.

I was actually thinking of Amazon RDS for Aurora[1], which seems to be a mySQL api layer over Amazon's BigTable backend. and similar to Google Cloud SQL.

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/

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

#130
post #117
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Amazon RDS for Aurora is what I was thinking of as being similar to Google's Cloud SQL... they're both mySQL API layers over the top of their BigTable/distributed backends.
Post reply on HN