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Is this because they actively want to discourage any revenue going Amazon's way from Wal-Mart related business activities, or because they don't trust Amazon no

Is this because they actively want to discourage any revenue going Amazon's way from Wal-Mart related business activities, or because they don't trust Amazon not to look at the data hosted on their platform? If the latter, then I think that's just extreme paranoia. If there was ANY evidence of Amazon doing that it would destroy everyones trust in AWS and I suspect people wouldn't be able to move away fast enough (Which actually long term would be good for Wal-Mart).

firebird84 9y ago
By the same token, if I were in Amazon's position, if I were to use the data, I'd make sure nobody knew about it. However, I'd then be in the unenviable position of the Enigma codebreakers, attempting to use information without the enemy knowing I had it.
- Touche 9y ago
  Why would they take the risk to find out information about a competitor that they are destroying?
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    Because knowing when and where a trainload of toilet paper is showing up at Walmart gives Amazon stronger bargaining power and ability to hurt Walmart. If they can add a penny to the earnings or take one away from Walmart, that means bonus and stock $$$.
  - jxi 9y ago
    The same reason you would want to find out information about a competitor you aren't destroying? Just because you're ahead doesn't mean you should rest on your laurels.
  - jxi 9y ago
    The same reason you would want to find out information about a competitor you aren't destroying? Just because you're ahead doesn't mean you should rest on your laurels.
- Johnny555 9y ago
  And also puts them in the impossible position of having enough top-notch Xen developers that can code a Xen data interception module that runs in the hypervisor to snoop traffic in real-time from instances, while at the same time, expecting this team to keep quiet about it while also making sure that no other team members who aren't "in the know" don't stumble upon the spying code and reveal it. They have to snoop the data from the hypervisor since the only place it's available decrypted is on the virtual machine processing the data.
  - CaptSpify 9y ago
    Forgive me as I don't know xen that well, but... Couldn't they just make a copy of the vm, isolate it, and then break into that one? sure the data will be "old", but not by a lot, and it would theoretically be undetectable.
    - Johnny555 9y ago
      That only gives them the data that's in-flight and already decrypted for processing, but any security conscious company will have their data segmented into many sections that are broken up into smaller pieces with their contents encrypted separately with a decryption key that's stored in a hardware HSM. If they want to capture the entire data stream, they'll need to capture it in real-time.
      - CaptSpify 9y ago
        A) I think you way overestimate the security practices of most companies. I have no knowledge of WM's practices. B) That's likely still going to be a large amount of very usable data
        Johnny555 9y ago
        Having worked at a bank that was moving some workloads to the cloud, I don't think I'm underestimating the security practices of companies that consider their company data to be valuable. In the application I was working on, they had over a TB of data, broken up into 32MB blocks, each with a unique key that had to be unwrapped by the HSM. If you stole the VM you'd get only a few blocks of readable data with it. I assume that if Walmart values this data, they'll take similar precautions in the cloud.
athenot 9y ago
It's the first option. They are pretty intent on making sure their spending doesn't make its way back to their biggest competitor.
- throwaway2048 9y ago
  Don't discount the latter option, corporate espionage is a very real thing that goes on far more often than people realize. Of course im about to be shouted down by a bunch of posts with [citation needed], well guess what, the goal of business like this is to ensure that nobody can ever make such a citation. There is a reason Google, Intel and Apple are extremely paranoid about their internal data, and Walmart too. Its no coincidence this goes hand in hand with being very successful and leaders in their field.
  - mbreese 9y ago
    It doesn't even have to be anything nefarious. For example just tracking network traffic (amount, not content) would be a good signal for a competitor (like Amazon) to monitor. If supplier A started getting a lot more network traffic from Walmart IP addresses and supplier B less, then that's a tell that someone could be interested in.
    - noir_lord 9y ago
      The digital version of using satellites to count lorries in warehouse yards and cars in supermarket car parks. Which also happens and is fascinating.
  - devmunchies 9y ago
    Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Walmart, and Amazon are all our clients, and Apple had strictest requirements of all of them. They want to guarantee that nobody is looking at their data.
- bsimpson 9y ago
  They certainly aren't the only major retailer to have an embargo against AWS because of Amazon's retail business.
_e 9y ago
The latter. Amazon doesn't have to look at the data directly but only passively monitor their own server logs to get an idea of what is happening.
pimmen 9y ago
If it's the former, it's classic anti-competitive practices that merits anti-trust charges.
pluc 9y ago
I worked on a WM project - they insisted on GCP instead of AWS so I think it's the former, unless they have some trust partnership with Google.
- soneil 9y ago
  We have a WM project on azure, so I don't think it's the later. But we also had issues with Amazon not wanting to run an appliance on vmware, so apparently it works both ways.
chinathrow 9y ago
> If the latter, then I think that's just extreme paranoia. Why? Everyone knows that metadata count these days. Which AWS/Amazon has plenty of.
dwighttk 9y ago
why not both?
michaelt 9y ago
If there was ANY evidence of Amazon doing that it would destroy everyones trust in AWS So if one insider with stock options notices another bending the rules, they're incentivised to cover it up rather than raise the alarm?
Spooky23 9y ago
I wouldn't call it extreme paranoia. Amazon has a pretty well established history of undermining business partners on the merchant side... why not competitors on the cloud side? Competitive intelligence is a thing. For all you know, Proctor and Gamble has Amazon consultants in house, and those folks may well have access to information sensitive to WalMart. Be careful about assuming rationality from the actors here. Lots of egos and competive people are at play here, and people will do incredibly dumb things to win.
mdasen 9y ago
I think it's harsh to call it extreme paranoia. I've heard that one of the reasons Amazon won't use Slack for its chat is because it isn't self-hosted. I'm sure many major companies won't use Gmail. I don't think Slack or Google have done anything that suggests they'd mine their platforms for corporate espionage. Slack isn't even in the same industry as Amazon. Is Amazon paranoid? According to the article, Walmart seems hesitant to support so much profit running to Amazon. While Amazon's retail business runs on razor thin margins, their cloud business reaps enormous profits. That means that the cloud business is helping Amazon put a lot of pressure on Walmart. Without it, would they be able to eat such thin to negative margins in the retail business or would they need to raise prices and make Walmart's offerings look better for consumers? In the article, they note that AWS was 89% of Amazon's operating income. It's likely that Amazon's thin retail margins would bother investors if AWS wasn't raking in money. It's also likely that AWS margins are helping Amazon be more aggressive in retail. Still, I don't think it would be more paranoid than most companies to avoid using a competitor's infrastructure at that size. Amazon will prefer self-hosing email rather than using Gmail regardless of assurances. It's not even just about trusting that the competitor wouldn't actively decide to peek into your data. It's trusting that no one in that company would take a peek even though that the competitive data could give them a huge career boost. Let's say Amazon hosts their email with Gmail. You're a struggling middle-manager at Google Cloud who has seen some failures. Maybe peek at Amazon's email and see what their cloud plans might be and when you're able to get out in front of Amazon you amaze your colleagues - maybe you have to bribe someone with access.* It's not just trusting that Google doesn't want to do this. *Now, I'm sure that Google has safeguards to make sure that employees can't do this (or it's at least hard), but the point is that you have to trust 1) the company, 2) the employees, and 3) procedures the company has put in place to prevent nefarious data access.
- snowwolf 9y ago
  Isn't Slack on AWS? So effectively it is self-hosted for them :) https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/slack/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/slack/
  - discodave 9y ago
dkrich 9y ago
My guess is that they know that Amazon is using AWS profits to fund losses in the ecommerce business. If they can get some large retailers off AWS, that might reduce Amazon's ability to pour cash into ecommerce and hurt their margins. It seems that a lot of people forget that Wal-Mart dwarfs Amazon in sales volume for companies like Procter and Gamble so probably have more leverage over them than most think.
- toyg 9y ago
  But retail-oriented companies are just a percentage of the global market. I don't think Walmart really has the power it thinks it has. As a distributor, I'm sure they know very well how to bully their supply chain, they are used to being the biggest fish in their pond; but in the grand scheme of things, from an AWS perspective, that supply chain is not that massive. Every company doing business with Walmart could drop AWS tomorrow (if they even use it today, which is not a given, considering that their core businesses are likely not internet-first) and AWS would probably survive. Retail and manufacturing are just two sectors, there are plenty more.
  - dkrich 9y ago
    Yeah, I don't disagree that AWS can survive without Procter and PepsiCo, but the point is that Wal-Mart is just trying to take a cut out of Amazon's bottom line (however large or small). This is becoming an all-out war between Wal-Mart and Amazon and I think Amazon feels more threatened by Wal-Mart than a lot of people think. For example, Amazon recently cut the minimum order size to $25 from $35 for free shipping in direct response to Wal-Mart reducing it's minimum to $35. My guess has been that Amazon wants to continue to add value to the Prime program in the hopes that they can start to ratchet up the cost or create different classes of Prime to try and extract more profit. The more steps that competitors like Wal-Mart take to pressure Amazon's ability to cross-subsidize and raise the price of Prime, the harder it's going to be for Amazon to extend its lead in ecommerce.
gadders 9y ago
>>or because they don't trust Amazon not to look at the data hosted on their platform? It's been known before: Battle of the Airlines: King 'backed dirty tricks': BA staff hacked into Virgin computers and poached passengers http://www.independent.co.uk/news/battle-of-the-airlines-king-backed-dirty-tricks-ba-staff-hacked-into-virgin-computers-and-poached-1477973.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/battle-of-the-airlines-kin...
user982 9y ago
> If there was ANY evidence of Amazon doing that it would destroy everyones trust in AWS and I suspect people wouldn't be able to move away fast enough The major telecoms were all revealed to be giving American users' data, traffic, and communications directly to the NSA a few years ago. Did you move away from them? Did anybody you know? As a historical reminder, those revelations were considered to be shocking at the time.
23david 9y ago
It's not paranoia. An ex-Amazon manager told me fairly recently that they look at customer performance data (trends etc) when evaluating future business opportunities. So once you start getting traction and customers, there's some internal product manager evaluating whether it's worth entering your market.
- devmunchies 9y ago
  Is this for real? Thats terrible.
  - throwawaymanbot 9y ago
    It is undeniably terrible, But welcome to fortune 500 business practices. In this world you are seen as weak if you DONT do these things.
- hbosch 9y ago
  I highly doubt this. It would be extremely careless by Amazon to jeopardize their insanely-successful, industry-leading profit-machine with something so reckless.
  - phil21 9y ago
    I didn't even think this was debateable any longer. It absolutely happens on their retail side. I don't think anyone will have a confirmed example of it happening to AWS customers - but if they are completely willing to destroy smaller vendors on the retail side with their own branded products, I can't imagine them saying AWS is where they draw the ethics line in the sand. You could make a case for Netflix being an example on the AWS side, but I'd bet more on coincidence. Amazon would be amazingly and utterly stupid if they were not analyzing their AWS service usage/traffic/spends by market vertical, and I'd imagine must more granular than that. That's simply to sell to people. It's not much of a leap to start using that data to direct internal development and identify unexpected areas of growth.
    - 9y ago

firebird84 9y ago

By the same token, if I were in Amazon's position, if I were to use the data, I'd make sure nobody knew about it. However, I'd then be in the unenviable position of the Enigma codebreakers, attempting to use information without the enemy knowing I had it.

Touche 9y ago
Why would they take the risk to find out information about a competitor that they are destroying?
- Spooky23 9y ago
  Because knowing when and where a trainload of toilet paper is showing up at Walmart gives Amazon stronger bargaining power and ability to hurt Walmart. If they can add a penny to the earnings or take one away from Walmart, that means bonus and stock $$$.
- jxi 9y ago
  The same reason you would want to find out information about a competitor you aren't destroying? Just because you're ahead doesn't mean you should rest on your laurels.
- jxi 9y ago
  The same reason you would want to find out information about a competitor you aren't destroying? Just because you're ahead doesn't mean you should rest on your laurels.
Johnny555 9y ago
And also puts them in the impossible position of having enough top-notch Xen developers that can code a Xen data interception module that runs in the hypervisor to snoop traffic in real-time from instances, while at the same time, expecting this team to keep quiet about it while also making sure that no other team members who aren't "in the know" don't stumble upon the spying code and reveal it. They have to snoop the data from the hypervisor since the only place it's available decrypted is on the virtual machine processing the data.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  Forgive me as I don't know xen that well, but... Couldn't they just make a copy of the vm, isolate it, and then break into that one? sure the data will be "old", but not by a lot, and it would theoretically be undetectable.
  - Johnny555 9y ago
    That only gives them the data that's in-flight and already decrypted for processing, but any security conscious company will have their data segmented into many sections that are broken up into smaller pieces with their contents encrypted separately with a decryption key that's stored in a hardware HSM. If they want to capture the entire data stream, they'll need to capture it in real-time.
    - CaptSpify 9y ago
      A) I think you way overestimate the security practices of most companies. I have no knowledge of WM's practices. B) That's likely still going to be a large amount of very usable data
      - Johnny555 9y ago
        Having worked at a bank that was moving some workloads to the cloud, I don't think I'm underestimating the security practices of companies that consider their company data to be valuable. In the application I was working on, they had over a TB of data, broken up into 32MB blocks, each with a unique key that had to be unwrapped by the HSM. If you stole the VM you'd get only a few blocks of readable data with it. I assume that if Walmart values this data, they'll take similar precautions in the cloud.

athenot 9y ago

It's the first option. They are pretty intent on making sure their spending doesn't make its way back to their biggest competitor.

throwaway2048 9y ago
Don't discount the latter option, corporate espionage is a very real thing that goes on far more often than people realize. Of course im about to be shouted down by a bunch of posts with [citation needed], well guess what, the goal of business like this is to ensure that nobody can ever make such a citation. There is a reason Google, Intel and Apple are extremely paranoid about their internal data, and Walmart too. Its no coincidence this goes hand in hand with being very successful and leaders in their field.
- mbreese 9y ago
  It doesn't even have to be anything nefarious. For example just tracking network traffic (amount, not content) would be a good signal for a competitor (like Amazon) to monitor. If supplier A started getting a lot more network traffic from Walmart IP addresses and supplier B less, then that's a tell that someone could be interested in.
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    The digital version of using satellites to count lorries in warehouse yards and cars in supermarket car parks. Which also happens and is fascinating.
- devmunchies 9y ago
  Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Walmart, and Amazon are all our clients, and Apple had strictest requirements of all of them. They want to guarantee that nobody is looking at their data.
bsimpson 9y ago
They certainly aren't the only major retailer to have an embargo against AWS because of Amazon's retail business.

_e 9y ago

The latter. Amazon doesn't have to look at the data directly but only passively monitor their own server logs to get an idea of what is happening.

pimmen 9y ago

If it's the former, it's classic anti-competitive practices that merits anti-trust charges.

pluc 9y ago

I worked on a WM project - they insisted on GCP instead of AWS so I think it's the former, unless they have some trust partnership with Google.

soneil 9y ago
We have a WM project on azure, so I don't think it's the later. But we also had issues with Amazon not wanting to run an appliance on vmware, so apparently it works both ways.

chinathrow 9y ago

> If the latter, then I think that's just extreme paranoia. Why? Everyone knows that metadata count these days. Which AWS/Amazon has plenty of.

dwighttk 9y ago

why not both?

michaelt 9y ago

If there was ANY evidence of Amazon doing that it would destroy everyones trust in AWS So if one insider with stock options notices another bending the rules, they're incentivised to cover it up rather than raise the alarm?

Spooky23 9y ago

I wouldn't call it extreme paranoia. Amazon has a pretty well established history of undermining business partners on the merchant side... why not competitors on the cloud side? Competitive intelligence is a thing. For all you know, Proctor and Gamble has Amazon consultants in house, and those folks may well have access to information sensitive to WalMart. Be careful about assuming rationality from the actors here. Lots of egos and competive people are at play here, and people will do incredibly dumb things to win.

mdasen 9y ago

I think it's harsh to call it extreme paranoia. I've heard that one of the reasons Amazon won't use Slack for its chat is because it isn't self-hosted. I'm sure many major companies won't use Gmail. I don't think Slack or Google have done anything that suggests they'd mine their platforms for corporate espionage. Slack isn't even in the same industry as Amazon. Is Amazon paranoid? According to the article, Walmart seems hesitant to support so much profit running to Amazon. While Amazon's retail business runs on razor thin margins, their cloud business reaps enormous profits. That means that the cloud business is helping Amazon put a lot of pressure on Walmart. Without it, would they be able to eat such thin to negative margins in the retail business or would they need to raise prices and make Walmart's offerings look better for consumers? In the article, they note that AWS was 89% of Amazon's operating income. It's likely that Amazon's thin retail margins would bother investors if AWS wasn't raking in money. It's also likely that AWS margins are helping Amazon be more aggressive in retail. Still, I don't think it would be more paranoid than most companies to avoid using a competitor's infrastructure at that size. Amazon will prefer self-hosing email rather than using Gmail regardless of assurances. It's not even just about trusting that the competitor wouldn't actively decide to peek into your data. It's trusting that no one in that company would take a peek even though that the competitive data could give them a huge career boost. Let's say Amazon hosts their email with Gmail. You're a struggling middle-manager at Google Cloud who has seen some failures. Maybe peek at Amazon's email and see what their cloud plans might be and when you're able to get out in front of Amazon you amaze your colleagues - maybe you have to bribe someone with access.* It's not just trusting that Google doesn't want to do this. *Now, I'm sure that Google has safeguards to make sure that employees can't do this (or it's at least hard), but the point is that you have to trust 1) the company, 2) the employees, and 3) procedures the company has put in place to prevent nefarious data access.

snowwolf 9y ago
Isn't Slack on AWS? So effectively it is self-hosted for them :) https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/slack/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/slack/
- discodave 9y ago

dkrich 9y ago

My guess is that they know that Amazon is using AWS profits to fund losses in the ecommerce business. If they can get some large retailers off AWS, that might reduce Amazon's ability to pour cash into ecommerce and hurt their margins. It seems that a lot of people forget that Wal-Mart dwarfs Amazon in sales volume for companies like Procter and Gamble so probably have more leverage over them than most think.

toyg 9y ago
But retail-oriented companies are just a percentage of the global market. I don't think Walmart really has the power it thinks it has. As a distributor, I'm sure they know very well how to bully their supply chain, they are used to being the biggest fish in their pond; but in the grand scheme of things, from an AWS perspective, that supply chain is not that massive. Every company doing business with Walmart could drop AWS tomorrow (if they even use it today, which is not a given, considering that their core businesses are likely not internet-first) and AWS would probably survive. Retail and manufacturing are just two sectors, there are plenty more.
- dkrich 9y ago
  Yeah, I don't disagree that AWS can survive without Procter and PepsiCo, but the point is that Wal-Mart is just trying to take a cut out of Amazon's bottom line (however large or small). This is becoming an all-out war between Wal-Mart and Amazon and I think Amazon feels more threatened by Wal-Mart than a lot of people think. For example, Amazon recently cut the minimum order size to $25 from $35 for free shipping in direct response to Wal-Mart reducing it's minimum to $35. My guess has been that Amazon wants to continue to add value to the Prime program in the hopes that they can start to ratchet up the cost or create different classes of Prime to try and extract more profit. The more steps that competitors like Wal-Mart take to pressure Amazon's ability to cross-subsidize and raise the price of Prime, the harder it's going to be for Amazon to extend its lead in ecommerce.

gadders 9y ago

>>or because they don't trust Amazon not to look at the data hosted on their platform? It's been known before: Battle of the Airlines: King 'backed dirty tricks': BA staff hacked into Virgin computers and poached passengers http://www.independent.co.uk/news/battle-of-the-airlines-king-backed-dirty-tricks-ba-staff-hacked-into-virgin-computers-and-poached-1477973.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/battle-of-the-airlines-kin...

user982 9y ago

> If there was ANY evidence of Amazon doing that it would destroy everyones trust in AWS and I suspect people wouldn't be able to move away fast enough The major telecoms were all revealed to be giving American users' data, traffic, and communications directly to the NSA a few years ago. Did you move away from them? Did anybody you know? As a historical reminder, those revelations were considered to be shocking at the time.

23david 9y ago

It's not paranoia. An ex-Amazon manager told me fairly recently that they look at customer performance data (trends etc) when evaluating future business opportunities. So once you start getting traction and customers, there's some internal product manager evaluating whether it's worth entering your market.

devmunchies 9y ago
Is this for real? Thats terrible.
- throwawaymanbot 9y ago
  It is undeniably terrible, But welcome to fortune 500 business practices. In this world you are seen as weak if you DONT do these things.
hbosch 9y ago
I highly doubt this. It would be extremely careless by Amazon to jeopardize their insanely-successful, industry-leading profit-machine with something so reckless.
- phil21 9y ago
  I didn't even think this was debateable any longer. It absolutely happens on their retail side. I don't think anyone will have a confirmed example of it happening to AWS customers - but if they are completely willing to destroy smaller vendors on the retail side with their own branded products, I can't imagine them saying AWS is where they draw the ethics line in the sand. You could make a case for Netflix being an example on the AWS side, but I'd bet more on coincidence. Amazon would be amazingly and utterly stupid if they were not analyzing their AWS service usage/traffic/spends by market vertical, and I'd imagine must more granular than that. That's simply to sell to people. It's not much of a leap to start using that data to direct internal development and identify unexpected areas of growth.
  - 9y ago