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Amazon Web Services CEO: We’re a $30b revenue business in the ‘early stages’
- nakodari 8y agoI really wish they reduce their public bandwidth cost to half. It will make such a major impact on the internet as a whole that we will see lots of companies grow faster and newer video heavy apps launching.
- fooker 8y agoWhy do you think they have the margins to afford this?
- tw04 8y agoWhat do you mean? Their bandwidth charges currently would be considered egregious for even a medium sized company. Someone the size of Amazon has obviously negotiated far, far lower peering rates than that. The only reason their outbound prices are so high is to keep people from getting out in a cost effective manner. They want to make customers think long and hard before leaving.
- fooker 8y ago> The only reason their outbound prices are so high is to keep people from getting out in a cost effective manner. This doesn't make any sense. Getting out is a one time operation, vs paying a higher recurring fee.
- scrollaway 8y agoGetting out is not necessarily a one-time operation. It can mean switching some services to a competing offer, even just for an evaluation period. So for example, say, you're using a bunch of hosted AWS services and Google's BigQuery.
- jessaustin 8y agoLots of data must be kept for e.g. 7 years yet is never used. Maybe that should never have been in AWS in the first place, but once it's there this is a factor.
- fooker 8y agoAmazon will happily ship you a disk : https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/disk/details/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/disk/details/
- jessaustin 8y agoThat's not free either.
- NathanKP 8y agoYou can get an 80 TB Snowball to use for 10 days for $250, and pay a minor shipping charge to get it to and from the AWS datacenter. That's not free but its cheap enough that it should be a tiny decimal point percentage of the value of the 80 TB of business data you can fit on the Snowball. And yes Snowball goes both ways: you can get data into AWS or out of AWS.
- jessaustin 8y agoThanks, that's great info. Hopefully the snowball is considered to be in the same "availability zone"?
- tw04 8y agoAnd how many businesses have 80TB of valuable data that is valuable when it's offline for potentially weeks while it's moved onto the snowball, shipped, taken off of the snowball, and then converted into a usable format onsite? Ignoring the fact you lose all metadata transferring via snowball and any ACLs depending on the type of data and where you pulled it from. You can't pull from anything BUT S3 either. So that database? Sorry, online. The Glacier archive? Going to have to rehydrate it first. The $250 is a rounding error for sure, but not on the cost of the data, on the cost of restoring the data. Even S3 itself you're ignoring the fact that you've got $2,500 in transfer fees alone on that 80TB.
- pmart123 8y agoIn theory, but this would not be true in practice. The cost is meant to make Redshift the default data warehouse versus that “cool new service” over there as an example. Each one of these types of decisions creates more AWS team expertise, and a harder decision to migrate to another service.
- mrep 8y agoTheir gross margin is over 20% according to their public reports and their networking margin is about 90% according to the AWS network engineer I talked to last year so I think they could afford it.
- fooker 8y agoThat doesn't seem high enough to justify halving prices unless it significantly increases revenue, which is pretty unlikely at this point.
- jessaustin 8y agoBut OP's hypothesis is "It will make such a major impact on the internet as a whole that we will see lots of companies grow faster and newer video heavy apps launching." Disagree with that if you like, but if that's true then the revenue will take care of itself.
- CamperBob2 8y agoLosing money on every exabyte and making it up in volume?
- votepaunchy 8y ago90% margins -> cut prices in half -> lose money?!?
- fooker 8y ago20% Doesn't help to just consider network margins.
- jessaustin 8y agoThat's all we're talking about; thread parent said "reduce their public bandwidth cost to half". Obviously, you can argue that this price change idea is not strategically in AWS interest (AWS management agrees right now), but the trivial nitpicking ITT is misguided.
- speeq 8y agoHere's a few ideas to start a video heavy app on a budget: You could store files in a Backblaze B2 bucket and serve them via Cloudflare with zero bandwidth fees. Or try DigitalOcean's Spaces offering with their built-in CDN at $0.01/GB for bandwidth. Hardware video encoding could be done using cheap Hetzner servers that include GTX 1080 GPU's (lookup NVENC) or try Intel Quick Sync encoding (perhaps using OVH's overclocked i7-7700K CPU's).
- desdiv 8y ago>You could store files in a Backblaze B2 bucket and serve them via Cloudflare with zero bandwidth fees. From Cloudflare's TOS [0]: >2.8 Limitation on Non-HTML Caching >The Service is offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as a part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Service solely for the purpose of serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other application and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) protocol or other equivalent technology. Use of the Service for the storage or caching of video (unless purchased separately as a Paid Service) or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited. Of course Cloudflare offers commercial plans that feature video CDN, but it will cost you and it will cost you similarly to other video CDN providers. [0] https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/ https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/
- speeq 8y agoYeah, I meant zero egress fees from B2. It's a shame that Cloudflare isn't more transparent about their bandwidth limits but my guess is that traffic would still be cheaper than from Amazon. Maybe someone from their team could weigh in ..
- judge2020 8y agoAll this means is that your main website, where these files are embedded/served from, also needs to be on Cloudflare (and proxied).
- dlhavema 8y ago
- amelius 8y agoIs YouTube still operating at a loss? If so, then don't expect video distribution to be cheap.
- reallydude 8y agoDepends on how you want to measure revenue. YT itself is a massive cash hole. It's the advertising that carries it. YT Red (and other types of paid service) are bumps in the economic redline. "Google has never revealed YouTube's revenue" but you can quantify it (roughly) from known values and costs. Ultimately profitability of a product within Alphabet depends on how you want to categorize technology within Alphabet. DFP and YT, at the very least, are separate products.
- jimrandomh 8y agoThey probably weren't ever operating at a loss. There were some stories speculating about YouTube's costs a few years back, but they were based on market prices for hosting which would be much, much higher than Google's internal costs.
- asien 8y agoStrongly Agree with Andy in that interview. In U.S , one way or another everything is running in the cloud. For Europe ? It’s more complicated , most large businesses still have their own datacenters or run using dedicated machine with European hosting (OVH). I’ve worked for many differents banks and they barely use the cloud compared to startups like N26 or Revolut. Same thing for Industries or Health Services they largely run « On Premise » compared to U.S equivalent. There is still room for growth from Europe if they manage to convince leaders of large corporations that the cloud will not take the their sovereignty away from them .
- angarg12 8y agoI've worked as a consultant in Germany and I was shocked by how far behind your average company is regarding cloud adoption. Modern tools and processes are also usually a pipe dream. So I agree, the industry as a whole has way more room to grow than you would suspect.
- Thaxll 8y agoEurope is the next big cloud customer since they're always behind US for tech adoption.
- noir_lord 8y agoAlways is a strong word. France had usable networked computers everywhere long before the us did (it was called minitel) Over on the UK my local Telco (not BT) was doing video on demand over copper ~2000, they where also one of the first to switch a fully packet switched internal backbone (so successfully other telcos came to look at how they did it). We had chip and pin a decade before the US. Our median internet connection is better. Is the US the world leader sure, always ahead..not so much.
- gizmodo59 8y agoInternet in US is just terrible for 90% of the population. Even if you are in the Bay Area or Manhattan you are still getting bad speed and you are stuck with a provider like Spectrum or Comcast and you pay 70$ for 150-200Mbps. I just don’t see this changing anytime soon :(
- ttul 8y agoMakes you wonder if one day AWS will overtake its parent.
- reallydude 8y agoAWS carried Amazon out of mediocrity in 2008. It accounts for something like 70% of operating revenue. What does 'overtake' mean?
- gergi 8y agoI'm not sure how Amazon was mediocre by any measure in 2008 but your second statement is incorrect - AWS only accounts for ~10% of Amazon's revenue. https://venturebeat.com/2019/01/31/amazon-earnings-q4-2018/ https://venturebeat.com/2019/01/31/amazon-earnings-q4-2018/
- reallydude 8y ago> how Amazon was mediocre by any measure in 2008 History is there for analysis. The stock falling to April2007 levels in Sept2008 showed serious volatility and hadn't yet declared profits that carried it above Sun and Toy R Us yet. It was somewhere in the top 300 profitable companies. It was still carrying the HUGE debt load that they have been carrying over to enable yet another tax free year in 2018, despite another record year. Quite a bet to make that they would be successful where AWS was just exiting beta. It was completely orthogonal to their barely-on-track online retail business model. It was a meh company and the stock price reflected that.
- riku_iki 8y ago5B out of total 60B for last Q = 8%, not 70%.
- kennydude 8y agoMaybe they can get half of their services to work properly then?
- samstave 8y agoI love AWS. Some things that I think can still happen on AWS, if not already happening: VPC Images! Basically a VPC launch button that has a series of terraform/*form rules that deploy a SaaS-in-a-box: Meaning, VPC images of infra to support a business case. Want to start up an infra that can receive video uploads and display them on a portal? Click here. etc...
- stunt 8y agoThe first item in my wish list is a better and more intuitive Cloudformation. So much busy work they’ve created around their platform.
- staticassertion 8y agoCheck out aws-cdk ?
- NathanKP 8y agoThis is the AWS Cloud Development Kit. It is still under very active development, so keep that in mind as a caveat, but it provides a much higher level, much more simple and intuitive way to define cloud infrastructure as code in your favorite languages: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-cdk https://github.com/awslabs/aws-cdk For context I've been able to take thousands of lines of CloudFormation YAML and replace it with around 500 lines of much clearer and easier to read JavaScript. And that 500 lines automatically builds five Lambda functions, builds, pushes, and launches two Docker images that run in AWS Fargate, configures an API Gateway and a CloudFront distribution. CDK is really a game changer in terms of allowing developers to take an idea and turn it into infrastructure as code extremely quickly and properly (CDK automatically generates many best practices like minimal IAM roles, minimal security group settings, etc)
- stunt 8y agoI'd not call CDK an intuitive replacement for Cloudformation. It is like, hey guys! we don't have a better solution to give them a common tool/language to provision their stack. So lets make it an object-oriented abstraction, at least give them auto-complete.
- stunt 8y agoUnlike the old web hosting platfors, Cloud computing is becoming a big monopoly. Which is really bad for everyone. We are in early stages and the monopoly will get worse.
- Sumaso 8y agoHow are we even close to a monopoly? I could maybe see a oligopoly, but even though amazon is big, its not the whole market.
- Eire_Banshee 8y agoIts the only serious use case for enterprise. What, you want to use azure?
- delecti 8y agoI worked at Amazon for over 5 years and I currently work for a pretty big company (you've heard of them) that's all-in on Azure. It's got enough going for it that I wouldn't switch even if I were high enough in the hierarchy to make that decision.
- gnahckire 8y agoGCP, Azure, Oracle, Alibaba ... just to name a few.
- fierro 8y agoIt will likely never be a true monopoly. But an oligopoly with two or three players? That's where we are and where we'll remain.
- bko 8y agoIt certainly has the potential to be a huge market. What barriers prevent others from entering? Software? Does Amazon have have a monopoly on strong technical workers or patents? Not sure about the ladder, but certainly not the former. Capital? Cloud hosting is probably capital intensive but there is plenty of interested parties with capital. Legislation? Probably a lot lower barrier to entry than other industries, although I'm not sure. It could just be that they are executing better than the others.
- appsonify 8y agoIf AWS gets Serverless right....and they are so far with Layers and Runtime API, they are in for a new golden era. I know people have been on the edge about serverless in the past but it's now reached a point where I'm planning to actively employ them. 2019, will be the Year of Serverless methinks.
- davidjnelson 8y agoIt will be great when serverless aurora's data api can run sql queries at 5ms-ish latency instead of the current 200ms. Then lambda functions will be able to use sql in a performant way. For applications that need relational databases, fargate seems to still be the best option.
- techntoke 8y agoIt is time for Kubernetes and other solutions to build a decentralized federated cloud offering.