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Serious question: I've heard that Bezos's approach with building out commercial units is to break down each part of the vertical into separate commercially-viab

Serious question: I've heard that Bezos's approach with building out commercial units is to break down each part of the vertical into separate commercially-viable components. Idea being if AWS doesn't make sense for 3rd parties to use then it may not be economical to use it internally. Now the question part: would Amazon ever secretly run Amazon.com in a multi-cloud setup, balancing between AWS, GCE, Azure, etc?

nevir 8y ago
As someone that worked at Amazon a long time ago—back when AWS was just getting started—can confirm (historically). Publicly there were a myriad of AWS services; internally all we could use was S3 (for many years), if we were lucky. AWS being born of Amazon's "spare capacity" is an urban legend. Nowadays, I hear it's quite different, and much of AWS is more rapidly dogfooded.
- cabaalis 8y ago
  I'm a big fan of dogfooding. But given Amazon's ecommerce huge computing needs, maybe it would make sense to not burden the compute availability of your fledgling cloud offering with your ginormous system?
  - klodolph 8y ago
    If built well your compute offering can scale with the resources you give it. If you have Amazon’s commerce platform running on a pool of computers, the team running commerce can give those computers to EC2 in exchange for an equivalent amount of EC2 quota. In theory it’s a bookkeeping operation. There are plenty of good reasons why you wouldn’t run Amazon’s commerce on EC2, but I don’t think cloud availability is one of them.
    - ryanianian 8y ago
      FWIW 100% of the Amazon retail website is run on EC2 (and iirc it's 100% on spot instances too). (There are of course lots of internal services that still use non-ec2 capacity but fewer and fewer every day.)
      - discodave 8y ago
        I don't think the spot thing is accurate. Amazon retail EC2 capacity is more like reserved instances.
      - 15charlimitdumb 8y ago
        note though it is not 100% AWS, ex they use Akamai instead of cloudfront
- chronid 8y ago
  Some services (before I left) just did not have the sheer capacity to have Amazon.com as a customer at peak. The service teams just said "nope, sorry, you're going to kill us". The requirements for prime day/black friday/cyber monday were mind-boggling.
  - xkjkls 8y ago
    That was quickly adjusted. I think like 3 years ago, Amazon publicly was saying that every day to AWS they were adding the same amount of computing power that was used to run Amazon.com when it was a $10 billion business. AWS is massively greater in scale than Amazon.com at this point.
    - ec109685 8y ago
      Scaling services for many independent businesses is somewhat of a different challenge than “vertically” scaling for one large one like amazon.com.
    - chronid 8y ago
      I cannot confirm or deny that (since my memories are sorta fuzzy), but the real problem was not EC2 capacity. Many other AWS services were involved. :)
  - greenleafjacob 8y ago
    This is not right from an infra POV. You are just moving the problem (by team) but it doesn’t go away. Then you end up with duplication.
    - hobofan 8y ago
      At the same time you are also giving the other team more flexibility to solve the problem, as they can optimize it for the Amazon.com use case and are not constrained to a generic solution that is optimized for the masses.
lev99 8y ago
> Now the question part: would Amazon ever secretly run Amazon.com in a multi-cloud setup, balancing between AWS, GCE, Azure, etc? I'm not sure how secretive it would be. AWS 'bids' on Amazon.com's business and Amazon.com is under no obligation to use AWS as it's cloud service provider.
- coryfklein 8y ago
  Are these bids currently public knowledge then?!
  - lev99 8y ago
    Id would be pretty hard to hide if Amazon.com's images are severed from Azure ip addresses...
    - core-questions 8y ago
      They're more than big enough to be bringing their own public IP blocks to a provider and having them announce with BGP. Hell, even us regular joes can do that with services like Packet.Net or Vultr.
    - tomjakubowski 8y ago
      Surely the public-facing stuff is just the tip of the infrastructure iceberg.
    - chx 8y ago
      The use Akamai for that
camtarn 8y ago
Worked for Amazon a few years back. I can't see Amazon ever using external cloud hosting for anything except the most trivial of tasks. They're absolutely, utterly paranoid about any sort of confidential information, and I think even with encryption the perceived risk would be too high.
- rb808 8y ago
  lol, meanwhile everyone else is trusting aws.
  - antonvs 8y ago
    Most companies can't afford to implement all the security and compliance measures that AWS, Google, or Azure does. The asymmetry in trust is partly because those cloud providers are huge, and partly because those things are part of their core competency.
  - stone-monkey 8y ago
    I don't see their comment as paranoid because cloud providers generally aee incompetent/steal your data, but because other cloud providers are direct competitors. Even if they're not sifting through your server data, they can possibly try to get a competitive advantage by analyzing things like usage data as someone above pointed out.
    - brownbat 8y ago
      When AT&T was forced by law to allow MCI switching equipment in their facilities, they tended to leave that room's window open, so pigeons could nest in the equipment. (I might have a detail wrong, this and a hundred other great telecom anecdotes are in The Master Switch.) Always nice to make sure no parties you depend on have conflicting interests.
  - insensible 8y ago
    I know of a big company that competes with Amazon outside the cloud that pressures its vendors not to use AWS for any of its data.
Spooky23 8y ago
I doubt it. These companies compete brutally, they would never allow Azure or Google to know their use patterns.
IDontWorkAtAmzn 8y ago
That's just marketing BS. One of Amazon Retail's big internal goals this year is "finally get everyone off of Oracle". Bezos opposed the creation of AWS. Almost everything that was early AWS (EC2, S3) was done over the objection of Seattle leadership. Look where the teams were based. After they shipped AWS, it took eighty zillion years for Retail to use anything AWS offered beyond S3, and, as mentioned above, it's not like their 100% on DDB or RDS now: they have dependencies on freakin' _Oracle_ all over the place. I mean, this is not a criticism of Bezos or Amazon at all, but at the end of the day, even if Bezos is a supergenius (and I see no reason to doubt that he is. Although I often wonder how he keeps himself motivated to continue to work so hard on building a Walmart competitor with the precious few years he has left on Earth given that he could do literally anything with his time), Amazon is still a company made of tens of thousands of people. It's not a 4 dimensional chess-ballet. It's got probably 95% of the same chaos and disorder that every big organization made of humans has. It just turns out that cutting it 5% in the right markets has incredible returns.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  AWS got built over the objection of he Chief Executive and majority owner of the company?

nevir 8y ago

As someone that worked at Amazon a long time ago—back when AWS was just getting started—can confirm (historically). Publicly there were a myriad of AWS services; internally all we could use was S3 (for many years), if we were lucky. AWS being born of Amazon's "spare capacity" is an urban legend. Nowadays, I hear it's quite different, and much of AWS is more rapidly dogfooded.

cabaalis 8y ago
I'm a big fan of dogfooding. But given Amazon's ecommerce huge computing needs, maybe it would make sense to not burden the compute availability of your fledgling cloud offering with your ginormous system?
- klodolph 8y ago
  If built well your compute offering can scale with the resources you give it. If you have Amazon’s commerce platform running on a pool of computers, the team running commerce can give those computers to EC2 in exchange for an equivalent amount of EC2 quota. In theory it’s a bookkeeping operation. There are plenty of good reasons why you wouldn’t run Amazon’s commerce on EC2, but I don’t think cloud availability is one of them.
  - ryanianian 8y ago
    FWIW 100% of the Amazon retail website is run on EC2 (and iirc it's 100% on spot instances too). (There are of course lots of internal services that still use non-ec2 capacity but fewer and fewer every day.)
    - discodave 8y ago
      I don't think the spot thing is accurate. Amazon retail EC2 capacity is more like reserved instances.
    - 15charlimitdumb 8y ago
      note though it is not 100% AWS, ex they use Akamai instead of cloudfront
chronid 8y ago
Some services (before I left) just did not have the sheer capacity to have Amazon.com as a customer at peak. The service teams just said "nope, sorry, you're going to kill us". The requirements for prime day/black friday/cyber monday were mind-boggling.
- xkjkls 8y ago
  That was quickly adjusted. I think like 3 years ago, Amazon publicly was saying that every day to AWS they were adding the same amount of computing power that was used to run Amazon.com when it was a $10 billion business. AWS is massively greater in scale than Amazon.com at this point.
  - ec109685 8y ago
    Scaling services for many independent businesses is somewhat of a different challenge than “vertically” scaling for one large one like amazon.com.
  - chronid 8y ago
    I cannot confirm or deny that (since my memories are sorta fuzzy), but the real problem was not EC2 capacity. Many other AWS services were involved. :)
- greenleafjacob 8y ago
  This is not right from an infra POV. You are just moving the problem (by team) but it doesn’t go away. Then you end up with duplication.
  - hobofan 8y ago
    At the same time you are also giving the other team more flexibility to solve the problem, as they can optimize it for the Amazon.com use case and are not constrained to a generic solution that is optimized for the masses.

lev99 8y ago

> Now the question part: would Amazon ever secretly run Amazon.com in a multi-cloud setup, balancing between AWS, GCE, Azure, etc? I'm not sure how secretive it would be. AWS 'bids' on Amazon.com's business and Amazon.com is under no obligation to use AWS as it's cloud service provider.

coryfklein 8y ago
Are these bids currently public knowledge then?!
- lev99 8y ago
  Id would be pretty hard to hide if Amazon.com's images are severed from Azure ip addresses...
  - core-questions 8y ago
    They're more than big enough to be bringing their own public IP blocks to a provider and having them announce with BGP. Hell, even us regular joes can do that with services like Packet.Net or Vultr.
  - tomjakubowski 8y ago
    Surely the public-facing stuff is just the tip of the infrastructure iceberg.
  - chx 8y ago
    The use Akamai for that

camtarn 8y ago

Worked for Amazon a few years back. I can't see Amazon ever using external cloud hosting for anything except the most trivial of tasks. They're absolutely, utterly paranoid about any sort of confidential information, and I think even with encryption the perceived risk would be too high.

rb808 8y ago
lol, meanwhile everyone else is trusting aws.
- antonvs 8y ago
  Most companies can't afford to implement all the security and compliance measures that AWS, Google, or Azure does. The asymmetry in trust is partly because those cloud providers are huge, and partly because those things are part of their core competency.
- stone-monkey 8y ago
  I don't see their comment as paranoid because cloud providers generally aee incompetent/steal your data, but because other cloud providers are direct competitors. Even if they're not sifting through your server data, they can possibly try to get a competitive advantage by analyzing things like usage data as someone above pointed out.
  - brownbat 8y ago
    When AT&T was forced by law to allow MCI switching equipment in their facilities, they tended to leave that room's window open, so pigeons could nest in the equipment. (I might have a detail wrong, this and a hundred other great telecom anecdotes are in The Master Switch.) Always nice to make sure no parties you depend on have conflicting interests.
- insensible 8y ago
  I know of a big company that competes with Amazon outside the cloud that pressures its vendors not to use AWS for any of its data.

Spooky23 8y ago

I doubt it. These companies compete brutally, they would never allow Azure or Google to know their use patterns.

IDontWorkAtAmzn 8y ago

That's just marketing BS. One of Amazon Retail's big internal goals this year is "finally get everyone off of Oracle". Bezos opposed the creation of AWS. Almost everything that was early AWS (EC2, S3) was done over the objection of Seattle leadership. Look where the teams were based. After they shipped AWS, it took eighty zillion years for Retail to use anything AWS offered beyond S3, and, as mentioned above, it's not like their 100% on DDB or RDS now: they have dependencies on freakin' _Oracle_ all over the place. I mean, this is not a criticism of Bezos or Amazon at all, but at the end of the day, even if Bezos is a supergenius (and I see no reason to doubt that he is. Although I often wonder how he keeps himself motivated to continue to work so hard on building a Walmart competitor with the precious few years he has left on Earth given that he could do literally anything with his time), Amazon is still a company made of tens of thousands of people. It's not a 4 dimensional chess-ballet. It's got probably 95% of the same chaos and disorder that every big organization made of humans has. It just turns out that cutting it 5% in the right markets has incredible returns.

fjsolwmv 8y ago
AWS got built over the objection of he Chief Executive and majority owner of the company?