4 ms·
"The acquisition, which completed on May 1, brings 70 cloud specialists into the wider group”. For comparison, Amazon has 40,000 employees in AWS.
by bigtones 6y ago
"The acquisition, which completed on May 1, brings 70 cloud specialists into the wider group”.
For comparison, Amazon has 40,000 employees in AWS.
- gibolt 6y agoSurely it can't be that many. And if it is, that has to include janitors at their data centers.
- cameronbrown 6y agoSure it can. Also, a lot more engineers are required to take a product to market at a big corp than a startup.
- saagarjha 6y agoThat’s more engineers than all of Facebook, AFAIK, and they’re not known for being particularly lean.
- mikorym 6y agoIf you look at the core technology only, then you often just need a handful of experts. It's all the rest that is the problem. The REAPER DAW was written by one person. The initial Linux kernel was written by one person. cURL was written by one person and even your BMW uses it [1]. The original Skype was written by three programmers. The list goes on... Of course, you later get a lot of maintainers joining the projects. But you certainly don't need 40 000 programmers if you are not selling your product, or not selling it yet. And even then I think a lot of those jobs are, while they are useful for AWS, not part of the core development. [1] https://curl.haxx.se/docs/companies.html https://curl.haxx.se/docs/companies.html
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y agoI'd wager a guess that less than half of that is engineering (At Oracle the sales:engineer ratio is around 3:1.)
- discodave 6y agoguess again
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoAre you sure that isn't the legal:engineer ratio.
- discodave 6y agoSeveral of the larger AWS services are at multi-hundred person engineering org headcounts. EC2 has thousands of engineers by my estimation. Source: I worked thete. There are 200+ AWS services now. So just 8 engineers (2 pizza team) for each service would be 1600 engineers. Let alone marketing, enterprise sales etc.
- speedgoose 6y agoThey will probably not attempt to compete against AWS on everything but focus on the core cloud technologies using off the shelf software and hardware. An alternative of EC2, S3, and ELB is already interesting and many companies provide that with fewer employees. No need to waste resources on products such as AWS Greengrass, or AWS Lumberyard, or even AWS EKS.
- discodave 6y agoJust EC2 networking (VPC) is several hundred, maybe 1000 employees. My guess at the total headcount for EC2 would be several thousand employees. Source: worked as an engineer at Amazon, including EC2 for 5 years.
- speedgoose 6y agoSome cloud providers have a lot fewer employees and are doing well. They don't have as many features compared to EC2 and VPC but it's not a major problem for them.
- discodave 6y agoIf you're talking about GCP, and MS, then they have thousands of engineers too. If you're talking about Digital Ocean, Mongo, and other medium sized players, then I only give them a couple more years before things get really ugly.
- speedgoose 6y agoYes I'm thinking about smaller players. I would bet GCP will be cancelled before most of the small players give up.
- oblio 6y agoGCP is moving the corporate needle. Not a lot, but it is. It won't be cancelled.
- saagarjha 6y agoDo they really? That’s an absurd number even by large company standards.
- voz_ 6y agoIts not so crazy if you think of every AWS product as its own med-large startup... That being said, that is a rather large number in terms of absolute company size.
- discodave 6y agoYes. Source: worked at Amazon for 5 years, including EC2.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoAmazon plans to hire at least 200,000 and have a target of 85% of all workloads on AWS by 2050.
- adventured 6y agoIt's not absurd, it's undersized in fact. AWS is nearing 50% larger than SAP in sales, which have 101,000 employees. AWS is now approximately the size of Oracle in sales, which have 136,000 employees.
- collyw 6y agoWhere do you find numbers like that? It would be interesting to see other companies.
- discodave 6y agoLooking up "Amazon Web Services" on LinkedIn, and going to the "people" tab gets you 50k people in 2020. So maybe you're even underestimating!
- mediascreen 6y agoDoesn't that include anyone who has ever worked for AWS?
- discodave 6y agoI'm 90% sure it doesn't include people who have updated their LinkedIn after they leave.