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Amazon Building a Tech Business for the Long Haul
- davis 11y agoIt was pretty strange seeing AWS written as A.W.S. It took me a second to realize what they were talking about.
- dlgeek 11y agoThe New York Times style guide requires periods between all initial-isms. They also write "F.B.I." and "C.I.A.". Drives me nuts.
- crabasa 11y agoCertainly, a good part of A.W.S. software is open source, which means it could be used elsewhere, and companies like Microsoft and Google also have big clouds. But neither of them, nor IBM, which also wants the cloud business, created more than 500 new features and services last year, as A.W.S. did. Not sure about the precision of that number, but the speed and agility of AWS compared to MSFT/GOOG/IBM is astonishing. I still don't quite understand how they do it.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- patio11 11y agoI think it's more or less "Throw a few billion dollars at the problem; continue doing so for years." (My over-under for the size of the AWS team would be, oh, 2,500 engineers.)
- azinman2 11y agoOr is it that everyone else is so slow. My guess is Google/MSFT is doing a lot of putting out fires since their offerings are newer than AWS, and they're not getting as much usage (which makes bugs appear earlier). That's been my understanding as to why Dropbox hasn't changed all that much -- they've just been making sure scaling works. But can teams of 10 at MSFT/GOOG really not put out new desirable product with any decent timeframe? They have enough staff members.
- abakker 11y agoI think with Google, it is really unclear whether the org. as a whole really believed in their Cloud products. They really don't take selling to the biggest users very seriously. Self-service has been fine for Google's low-margin businesses in the past, but its not clear that they've made any effort to invest in the ecosystem of other vendors the way Amazon has. If the IaaS vendor is low-cost/commodity, then most companies will be swayed by the size and competence of the ecosystem as a form of 'insurance'. Now that Alphabet is the parent company, maybe this part of google can be taken more seriously. They are very capable of succeeding, but they don't really understand B2B/Enteprise and really never have.
- varelse 11y agoSpeaking as an ex-googler, I think a disturbing amount of Google is dedicated to pointless blind-allocated me-too attempts to kick sand in the face of its competitors. Of course, I also think they could work wonders on their horrible attrition rate by ending blind allocation for middle to senior talent, so I'm clearly out of my mind.
- Pyxl101 11y agoI haven't heard about blind allocation before. Is there a good article I can read to learn more about it? This seems to explain some of it: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/2kzo5v/i_have_a_google_offer_but_im_interested_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/2kzo5v/i...
- pnathan 11y agoGoogle is legendary for its inability to have medium-/high-touch relationships with customers. Unfortunately. I've always thought their products were pretty high quality.
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- codeonfire 11y agoMy interpretation is that those companies are stodgey. It's always one or two guys trying to be in charge of the whole circus instead of having 5 rings going on. Google and Microsoft also have lengthy, old school review processes for performance, security, etc and lots of gatekeepers. Amazon plays more loose. Not sure about IBM, I thought they just outsource stuff and make jeopardy robots.
- Negitivefrags 11y agoIBM own Softlayer. http://www.softlayer.com/ http://www.softlayer.com/
- falcolas 11y agoPessimistically, I believe they achieve such speed by strictly limiting the amount time they put into polish and bugfixes for the products they've already created. After all, it works for their platform, what more could someone want?
- devy 11y agoHalf way through the article, it reads: One way Amazon adds so many features, though it won’t talk much about this, is to contract key elements from other companies. QuickSight, the data analysis tool announced on Wednesday as a competitor to IBM’s Cognos, uses technology A.W.S. hired from a start-up called Zoomdata, according to people familiar with the technology. They asked not to be named in order to maintain professional relationships.
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- rstianyu 11y agomicrosoft azure has added the same amount of new features during the past year as well (600+ features). the new services like machine learning, data factory, data lakes, sql data warehouse, and powerbi are amazingly powerful. the only problem is people seem to ignore them in the conversation of cloud computing.
- anon1mous 11y agoAmazon has by far the best dev leads. Some of them are guys who worked on the Common Lisp standards in the 80s, some are 22 yo Bring Your Own JS framework hippies. But the management manages to select for lead roles the very best devs internally and mighty capable ppl externally.
- quanticle 11y ago>I still don't quite understand how they do it. Why maintain and improve your existing services when you can get credit for launching a new shiny thing? Steve Yegge called out this tendency in his (in)famous platforms rant [1]: They prioritize launching early over everything else, including retention and engineering discipline and a bunch of other stuff that turns out to matter in the long run. So even though it's given them some competitive advantages in the marketplace, it's created enough other problems to make it something less than a slam-dunk. Amazon's "speed and agility" comes at the cost of not updating anything, ever. If you want new functionality, you'll have to integrate a new service. [1]: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX
- joevandyk 11y agoThere's benefits to immutable/stable services.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Hydraulix989 11y agoHow do they do it? With their Bezos-esque working hours, of course.
- 5ersi 11y agoWhat speed are you talking about? In my experience EC2 is not performant. For example: http://remcobron.com/cloud-server-review-and-comparison-amazon-aws-ec2-vs-linode-vs-digitalocean/ http://remcobron.com/cloud-server-review-and-comparison-amaz...
- ChrisLTD 11y agoAmazon.com is more than 20 years old. It’s not surprising they are in markets for the long haul.
- thoughtpalette 11y agoYea, the headline is poorly worded. Of course they're in tech for the long haul... especially considering their latest quarterly earnings report.
- newacctperpost 11y agoThis discussion of Amazon's agility meshes well with Steve Yegge's famous rant on Google and Amazon. He attributes Amazon's success to their focus on designing all their software as a service, and actually credits this strategy as the very reason that AWS came to be in the first place. https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX
- gashad 11y agoSuch a good read. Fun fact: it was first published 4 years ago to the day.
- HillaryBriss 11y agoYes. Great stuff. Just reading it ... Yegge sez: "a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product." I guess that's true. If I had to defend that statement, I'd try to argue that a platform, especially an open platform, will be tested, poked, prodded, evaluated, evolved and maybe even documented by many more developers than some monolithic piece of software in some closed code base. But what other arguments are there?
- sigmar 11y agoI started using uBlock's default-deny setting 2 weeks ago (it rejects all requests to secondary domains unless the domain is explicitly allowed). It's amazing to see how many websites use AWS or amazon ads these days. It is really strange to think about how the average consumer views Amazon as an online retailer, but that is really only half the picture. As the end of the article states: >Maybe someday A.W.S. will be the company that also happens to own an online retailer.
- empath75 11y agoI actually don't see how AWS and Amazon remain together in the long term. They seem like two totally different businesses with different goals, long term prospects, etc.
- abakker 11y agoThere is some relation there, though. The obviously use their own infrastructure to run Amazon, which has significant scaling/infrastructure requirement. Initially, of course, AWS was the "space capacity" at Amazon, now their total capacity vastly exceeds what their store needs. I think though that Amazon will probably remain more of a conglomerate, rather than divesting any parts of its business. Instead, it seems to add more and more brands, services, etc. In the long this will probably be good for them, since they'll be able to effectively integrate the experience of customers across all brands/services/etc.
- ksenzee 11y agoAWS didn't start out as Amazon.com's spare capacity. It was an entirely separate business idea. http://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/cloud-computing/the-myth-about-how-amazon-s-web-service-started-just-won-t-die.html http://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/cloud-computing/...
- petra 11y agoAmazon actually has/had a variety of groups aiming to be the "operating system" of other businesses - AWS, 3rd party fulfillment and sales, B2B marketplace, amazon stores(closed), etc. So not sure there's a mismatch problem. Also i wonder - how can Amazon tie all those B2B units into a larger whole ?
- petra 11y agoWhat's this talk about "no vendor lock-in"? i though that(lock-in) was the idea behind AWS's many services.
- qntmfred 11y agoit is. at the AWS Summit NYC in July you heard them say "All In" about a billion times
- fweespeech 11y agoIts a tech journalist that doesn't understand AWS is built around being the vendor you are locked into.
- airza 11y agonot really, everything i've used so far is pretty interoperable with whatever. The exception I guess would be their metaservices that do logging and auditing of AWS services, but the SDK is pretty developed to let you shove, say, S3 into whatever you want. I'm open to be corrected on this but I don't think it's good to confuse "our different offerings have lots of interoperable synergy" with "it's fucking impossible to migrate off this"
- adamc 11y agoPersonally, I don't think lock-in means "it's fucking impossible to migrate off this". It just means it will be sufficiently painful that it is a strong deterrent. A service can be great and still come with a lot of lock-in; it's just another trade-off to consider.
- rokhayakebe 11y agoCould Amazon be just a front/testing platform for AWS?
- BIair 11y agoThis should be higher.
- varelse 11y agoNo, it shouldn't. The relationship between Amazon and AWS is, um, complicated.
- rokhayakebe 11y agoWould you care to elaborate? AWS is a Business Unit of Amazon, how is the relationship complicated business wise?
- jazzdog 11y agoIs a top 10 U.S. retail business really just a testing platform? Are some of us perhaps a bit more tech-centric for our own good?
- tuna-piano 11y agoI think AWS and similiar cloud providers have a tough challenge for the long term. The big question is how cheap will computing get, and how will the demand of that computing increase over time? If prices continue to decrease rapidly, it becomes very difficult to maintain large revenue growth, even with unit-volume increases. In 20 years, how cheap will core services like S3 and ec2 be, and how will AWS' revenue on those services compare to today? They are also developing a lot of AWS software that probably won't decrease in price over time. For example, over the past 30 years database hardware has decreased dramatically in price, but Oracle software licenses have not. AWS has a lot of services that are some combination of complex software and hardware components.
- dogma1138 11y agoHardware hasn't really decreased that much not if you count what services you want to run these days on it compared to 10-20-30 years ago. If you just run a simple web-application sure it's much much cheaper today than it was in 2000, but as technology evolved that isn't enough for big business today, if you look at companies that still build their own servers then unless they have unlimited space the servers these days tend to be much more expensive and exotic hardware is more and more common (it's not that uncommon to see SQL/BI servers with quite expensive compute/GPU's these days, 5 years ago it was all those "IOPS accelerators" or "specialized" SSD's, in 5 years it will be something else). As far as looking at the price of S3 or EC2 in 20 years that's completely irrelevant because those services for the most part will be irrelevant in 20 years, yes their might have their own counterparts but it's not like you will still use the same services, just look at how drastically the way you build and deploy applications has changed in 10 years.
- harigov 11y agoI think it's a mistake to only look at margins. We should also look at economies of scale. In the future, as margins get lower, it is compensated by more customers. Also, whenever margins get lower, successful businesses tend to provide additional value and charge for it. It is already happening in cloud services. Few years ago, it was fully IaaS and now it's moving towards more PaaS. Who knows what will come next? I can already see so many things that could be done better, and that's just me.
- 5ersi 11y agoWe use AWS and this is what I can tell you: 1. Its really expensive: about 5 times as expensive as dedicated servers. 2. Not reliable: they will shoot down servers any time they like. You will need to make sure you have redundancies in place and pay for them. 3. Lock-in: their services (beyond EC2) come with a set of proprietary APIs that your app will depend on. This creates a lock in. 4. Still need DevOps: so you pay a lot, get locked-in and still need to put everything together by yourself and make sure it runs reliably? Yep, you still need devops/admins which at the end is probably the biggest cost of your operation. So, here are my suggestions: You have a low-volume and don't mind a lock in: use a dedicated mobile/web cloud ala Firebase/Parse/etc or go with a true PaaS solution like AppEngine/Heroku. If you have a big volume: you will need to bite the bullet, hire some devops and setup+maintain your own dedicated servers. You will at the end pay much less for servers compared to AWS, have full control over hem and have no lock-in.