11–20 of 136 posts
> So, if this graph is right, then over the last couple of years, somewhere between 50% and 80% of Amazon’s profit has been due to AWS.
What makes this even more bonkers to me is this is from something most non-tech people haven’t even heard of.
> So, if this graph is right, then over the last couple of years, somewhere between 50% and 80% of Amazon’s profit has been due to AWS.
Which Amazon has thanked almost everyone and their grocery stores for jumping on their bandwagon and spending nearly all their VC money on these services. Those without any significant revenues will have a hard-time paying up that huge AWS bill if they dared to use K8s or auto-scaling features. I would not want to look at the balance sheet of a companies accounts or quarterly earnings if they cannot generate lots of…
> So, if this graph is right, then over the last couple of years, somewhere between 50% and 80% of Amazon’s profit has been due to AWS.
Which Amazon has thanked almost everyone and their grocery stores for jumping on their bandwagon and spending nearly all their VC money on these services. Those without any significant revenues will have a hard-time paying up that huge AWS bill if they dared to use K8s or auto-scaling features. I would not want to look at the balance sheet of a companies accounts or quarterly earnings if they cannot generate lots of…
> So, if this graph is right, then over the last couple of years, somewhere between 50% and 80% of Amazon’s profit has been due to AWS.
I am pretty sure Amazon's retail business is going to completely dwarf AWS in the long term, because they are currently willing to break even on it (and possibly lose money) just to outdo the competition.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Under these circumstances, how is AWS lock-in and cost escalation any different from Oracle of the past? Why would any startup shackle themselves to AWS or any cloud when it's not portable? Lambdas, in particular, seem like the worst idea in the history of ideas. Once your org adopts them, how do you keep track of these mysterious, business-critical pieces of functionality? How do you ever plan to port them to someth…
> Why would any startup shackle themselves to AWS or any cloud when it's not portable? Depending on the startup, that may make sense if it allows for fast iteration. If a startup is trying to achieve product market fit, having a huge AWS bill is a good problem to have, since it means the product is actually successful.
> So, if this graph is right, then over the last couple of years, somewhere between 50% and 80% of Amazon’s profit has been due to AWS.
Which Amazon has thanked almost everyone and their grocery stores for jumping on their bandwagon and spending nearly all their VC money on these services. Those without any significant revenues will have a hard-time paying up that huge AWS bill if they dared to use K8s or auto-scaling features. I would not want to look at the balance sheet of a companies accounts or quarterly earnings if they cannot generate lots of…
The company I work for used to have most of its revenue come from VC-backed startups. Over time that changed as we courted more well-capitalized enterprises. If our VC-backed-startup customers all went bankrupt tomorrow, it would certainly hurt, but it wouldn't kill us, not by a long shot.
I would expect that to be even more true for a product like AWS, not less.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Under these circumstances, how is AWS lock-in and cost escalation any different from Oracle of the past? Why would any startup shackle themselves to AWS or any cloud when it's not portable? Lambdas, in particular, seem like the worst idea in the history of ideas. Once your org adopts them, how do you keep track of these mysterious, business-critical pieces of functionality? How do you ever plan to port them to someth…
Lambdas, at least the JS ones, are Node.js based and not hard at all to migrate to an alternative cloud service. You can even use a framework that handles all the cloud-specific functionality for you and works across AWS, Azure, GCloud, etc: https://www.serverless.com/ The lock-in really comes from AWS-specific services. Redis, Mongo, etc will have the same API no matter where you're hosting them, so it's pretty triv…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which Amazon has thanked almost everyone and their grocery stores for jumping on their bandwagon and spending nearly all their VC money on these services. Those without any significant revenues will have a hard-time paying up that huge AWS bill if they dared to use K8s or auto-scaling features. I would not want to look at the balance sheet of a companies accounts or quarterly earnings if they cannot generate lots of…
After working for a company that spends millions of VC money on AWS per year I can also say that infinite cloud scaling is a myth. We had all kinds of downtimes due to AWS over the years.
No, you just had downtime, full stop. Failures are inevitable, regardless of whose datacenter you're using. Failure-tolerant architecture design minimizes (or eliminates, if you're lucky) the downtime caused by failures. I'm not saying that's easy or necessarily appropriate depending on the stage of your company, but foisting responsibility onto AWS is missing the point.
Amazon's online store was basically an incubator that allowed the company to pivot to its real profit center: virtualized online services for startups and companies seeking to move to the cloud.
The only thing that makes sense to me is some political long play. The Amazon retail operation employs a lot more people in a lot more places than just the coast. I think leadership has realized they need to be seen as a job creator by politicians in order to join the "big boy industry" club. Which is why Amazon doesn't mind paying their warehouse workers more than all the other guys.
To that end, the Amazon.com is just a giant, self-funded employment program designed to make Amazon a bigger company.