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Unlike 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

by stunt 8y ago

Unlike 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 ago
How 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 ago
  Its the only serious use case for enterprise. What, you want to use azure?
  - delecti 8y ago
    I 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 ago
    GCP, Azure, Oracle, Alibaba ... just to name a few.
- fierro 8y ago
  It 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 ago
It 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.
- fierro 8y ago
  I think you severely underestimate what it means to run a public cloud business. "Probably capital intensive" betrays the naiveté of this comment. Even if you have 100 billion dollars in the bank, you're years behind. Go buy land, build datacenters (5 year lead time), sign power contracts with utility providers, figure out where to buy all your dram and disk and networking and shit and oh develop your cloud services too. Now keep them running.
  - the_duke 8y ago
    Even apart from the large infrastructure cost for a geographically distributed and reliable network, a lot of the value of AWS/GC/Azure comes from the many built in services that completely change the ops workload. Building out those services is a monumental task requiring loads of experts in their respective fields (databases, storage, networking, etc). I see this as at least as much of a hurdle as the capital expenditure.
  - anongraddebt 8y ago
    Underrated comment. To add on to your point: Amazon told Jassy in 2003/2004 to take 55 engineers and build out some cloud services they could sell to customers. ~6 years later, Microsoft decides to enter the market. That is an epic first-to-market timeline.
  - nroach 8y ago
    Agreed. Ask RAX how hard it is to compete in commodity cloud infrastructure.
    - leesalminen 8y ago
      I’m a RAX public cloud customer with a 6 figure bill every year and they are actively trying to get me to switch to AWS.
  - Twirrim 8y ago
    Oracle, with OCI, is working to crack the market. It has the kind of capital to be able to do it, but it's just insanely expensive. We're running out of companies that can possibly fund such work. Not only do you have to have the physical infrastructure to launch a region (expensive in and of itself), you pretty much have to have the infrastructure to launch at the minimum two regions geographically separated in some form. Plus with data locality laws increasingly enter the mix (something that AWS never had to worry about until they were already a success), you increasingly have to build regions everywhere or customers can't use you. Frankfurt, for example, is a virtual given. That's before you even start to consider all the engineering work involved writing the code to run the cloud services.
dleslie 8y ago
You could run a small business with an RPi and residential internet. That, and turn key solutions for websites and stores are probably bigger competition to colos and vps services.
pmart123 8y ago
We could be. Edge computing though could be an interesting partial disruptor, or it could further entrench the leaders as AWS already has an edge computing package I believe.

by stunt 8y ago

Unlike 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 ago

How 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 ago
Its the only serious use case for enterprise. What, you want to use azure?
- delecti 8y ago
  I 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 ago
  GCP, Azure, Oracle, Alibaba ... just to name a few.
fierro 8y ago
It 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 ago

It 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.

fierro 8y ago
I think you severely underestimate what it means to run a public cloud business. "Probably capital intensive" betrays the naiveté of this comment. Even if you have 100 billion dollars in the bank, you're years behind. Go buy land, build datacenters (5 year lead time), sign power contracts with utility providers, figure out where to buy all your dram and disk and networking and shit and oh develop your cloud services too. Now keep them running.
- the_duke 8y ago
  Even apart from the large infrastructure cost for a geographically distributed and reliable network, a lot of the value of AWS/GC/Azure comes from the many built in services that completely change the ops workload. Building out those services is a monumental task requiring loads of experts in their respective fields (databases, storage, networking, etc). I see this as at least as much of a hurdle as the capital expenditure.
- anongraddebt 8y ago
  Underrated comment. To add on to your point: Amazon told Jassy in 2003/2004 to take 55 engineers and build out some cloud services they could sell to customers. ~6 years later, Microsoft decides to enter the market. That is an epic first-to-market timeline.
- nroach 8y ago
  Agreed. Ask RAX how hard it is to compete in commodity cloud infrastructure.
  - leesalminen 8y ago
    I’m a RAX public cloud customer with a 6 figure bill every year and they are actively trying to get me to switch to AWS.
- Twirrim 8y ago
  Oracle, with OCI, is working to crack the market. It has the kind of capital to be able to do it, but it's just insanely expensive. We're running out of companies that can possibly fund such work. Not only do you have to have the physical infrastructure to launch a region (expensive in and of itself), you pretty much have to have the infrastructure to launch at the minimum two regions geographically separated in some form. Plus with data locality laws increasingly enter the mix (something that AWS never had to worry about until they were already a success), you increasingly have to build regions everywhere or customers can't use you. Frankfurt, for example, is a virtual given. That's before you even start to consider all the engineering work involved writing the code to run the cloud services.

dleslie 8y ago

You could run a small business with an RPi and residential internet. That, and turn key solutions for websites and stores are probably bigger competition to colos and vps services.

pmart123 8y ago

We could be. Edge computing though could be an interesting partial disruptor, or it could further entrench the leaders as AWS already has an edge computing package I believe.