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Anybody who's not Amazon didn't get into the cloud business for profit: they did it for survival. Post-AWS launch, writing was on that wall that amortizing you
by ethbr0 4y ago
Anybody who's not Amazon didn't get into the cloud business for profit: they did it for survival.
Post-AWS launch, writing was on that wall that amortizing your (already large) infrastructure costs across paying customers would be the only way to afford a certain scale and geographic distribution of hardware that was a prerequisite to taxing future value.
- deanCommie 4y agoAWS was built from the ground up on new infrastructure. There was no reuse of existing Amazon infrastructure except tooling. The whole "selling excess Q4 capacity" was a myth. https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/Amazon-web-services https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/Amazon-web-services goes into it in great detail.
- Nzen 4y agoMiscapitalized url, should be [0]. However, the page is mostly metadata pointing at a 2 hour youtube video [1]. [0] https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/amazon-web-services https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/amazon-web-services [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APvj15_YCqk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APvj15_YCqk
- deanCommie 4y agoThanks for fixing! Mobile autocorrect fail. It's a podcast first and foremost so the URL is still good for the direct links in various podcast players.
- jeffbee 4y agoThat doesn’t make sense in the context of google. Their own workloads are still way larger than their public cloud. Arguably their first offering, app engine, was the perfect fit because they shoved it into the cracks in between their other borg jobs. The fit of GCE in their overall platform is much worse.
- vineyardmike 4y agoIt does if Google can double their footprint. They announced reduced profitability recently in part due to capex for data centers. Last year google started warning some internal teams that they had to limit usage. It’s possible they’re running out of compute.
- jeffbee 4y agoGoogle has been internally chopping budgets since decades. Is how they keep utilization up. Look up “steamroller” or “ucp” if you don’t know those.