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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

#131

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…

I guess by "getting into cloud" I meant "creating a competitor to AWS".. I agree that Dropbox, Heroku and friends are all cloud businesses but they are not direct competitors to Amazons IaaS business.

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

#132
post #95

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…

It's actually kind of sad that they had a strong initial push to support other languages and platforms, only to let those SDK/API clients wither on the vine so to speak... The github issues on their public repos seem to be mostly unmaintained (several a month or older without an MS representative).

On the flip side, there were some issues with connecting to Azure via the node `mssql/tedious` module, which isn't from MS, and a few developers from MS Azure SQL teams stepped up to track down the issue. Learned a bit more about the TDS protocol than I really wanted to that month.

It seems to me that MS Azure's development department should either implement a 20-40% time for developers to work on the public stuff and/or documentation as developers desire, or have cowboy teams that do. MS isn't likely to spur more open development efforts as most corporate based projects don't inspire much community involvement.

That said, given the choice I might be more inclined to use Joyent, DigitalOcean or Linode for my own stuff... The choice wasn't mine at work, the existing solutions are mostly .Net (some Node) based and Azure was the most pragmatic choice of migration to a hosted solution when that was done almost two years ago. And running anything under Ubuntu VMs with docker on Azure is pretty trivial... Once the next generation infrastracture is in place (a couple months away), it will become easy enough to run anywhere.

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

#133
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?

SSL/TLS can only be configured if you use their "Web app" PaaS offering . If you're using plain VMs (IaaS) then there are no options for SSL/TLS. You have to do it yourself on your VMs using haproxy/nginx/stud.

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

#134
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that having a couple of billion annually to invest in cloud infrastructure and the economies of scale that it enables is a pretty big barrier to entry. At the moment the only realistic challengers to AWS are Microsoft and Google.

Rackspace? And what ever happened to Eucalyptus? https://www.eucalyptus.com/

Eucalyptus got sold to HP: http://www8.hp.com/us/en/hp-news/press-release.html?id=17905...

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

#136
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…

I was talking about BigQuery.

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

#137
post #118

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.

It's actually not difficult at all; there are already materiality rules (in the case of revenue disclosures, they're stated in percentages), and it's fraud to break them. You could just define material by both absolute dollars and also percentages.

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

#138

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 th…

I think you're correct, it probably just hit 5%. I'm just honestly amazed given the lack of transparency and risk in super gigantic corporations that there isn't an absolute dollar threshold for lines of business as well as a percentage one.

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

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most analysts seem to think that AWS is way bigger than Google's public cloud. That channel lead may well be right in terms of total number of servers or MW of datacenter capacity. BUT scale is not the only thing that the cloud brings. AWS is not just S3 and EC2. I think it's pretty clear that Amazon is much further along the road of productizing their cloud. i.e. providing all the products that businesses and most n…

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…

Reminds me a bit of Google+ and all the effort they sank into that to compete with FB...

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

#140
post #59
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, great. Apparently I didn't know they do. But again, being first doesn't automatically mean it's better. For instance, Sun's grid computing concept was earlier. > To me, this is an isolated incident. http://www.davidmturner.com/2013/07/26/gce-io-performance-su...

That's a 2 year old blog post from the time when GCE was still in beta. Apart from that, noisy neighbors happen on any cloud platform, and as the author of the article said, those test were far from scientific.

http://robusttechhouse.com/google-prediction-api-review/ It ranked the worst comparing to AWS and Azure
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