5 ms·

It never ceases to amaze me how an online bookstore can be so ahead of all the self-professed hosting providers. I'm excited to see what innovations come out o

It never ceases to amaze me how an online bookstore can be so ahead of all the self-professed hosting providers. I'm excited to see what innovations come out of this. Of course, this will only become really interesting when there are other providers doing the same.

cperciva 17y ago
It never ceases to amaze me how an online bookstore can be so ahead of all the self-professed hosting providers. Scale. It doesn't make sense to do things like this until you have thousands and thousands of nodes -- most hosting companies simply aren't anywhere near as big as Amazon.
- akamaka 17y ago
  I disagree. When Amazon started out, their datacenter couldn't have been nearly as big as those of top hosting companies. I can't imagine it would have taken more than a handful of Google-style shipping crates to host the site. I'd attribute their innovation more to their core values: Ignoring competitors - probably the biggest factor. They actually sat down and thought about what people want, rather than doing what everyone else was doing. This puts them ahead of traditional hosting providers, as well as competition-oriented companies like MS. Customer focus - having an insanely strong focus on the customer distinguishes them from equally innovative competitors like Google. Commitment - Amazon recognized from the start that they had limited resources, and very carefully chose to enter the cloud computing market, ignoring all the other proposals. This focused them more, while also giving the public more confidence in the service. Compare Google App Engine, which isn't taken with the same seriousness. Other than that, relative small size helps. Their customers know that Jeff won't eat them for lunch at the first opportunity. And having a few billion dollars of cash in the bank doesn't hurt either.
  - cperciva 17y ago
    When Amazon started out, their datacenter couldn't have been nearly as big as those of top hosting companies. Sure. But they didn't do Reserved Instances and Spot Instances when they started out. You only need a few racks in order to make renting Xen instances by the hour feasible; but in order to make a market for Spot Instances reasonable, you need to have enough "spare" capacity to support a stable market (i.e., one where a single customer won't dramatically shift the market price) -- given the variety of instance sizes, I doubt this would work without having hundreds of racks of spare capacity.
    - akamaka 17y ago
      Gotcha, you were talking specifically about spot pricing. I read the OP's comment more as asking "Why are they so consistently innovative?".
  - mbrubeck 17y ago
    "When Amazon started out, their datacenter couldn't have been nearly as big as those of top hosting companies. I can't imagine it would have taken more than a handful of Google-style shipping crates to host the site." If you're talking about when EC2 first started (2006), then I think you underestimate Amazon's scale by a couple orders of magnitude. For example, it's been a long time since Amazon has had "their datacenter" rather than many large datacenters around the world. [Note: I was an Amazon employee from 2005 to 2008.] Consider that Amazon had $10 billion in revenue in 2006, (how many pageviews does it take to end up with that many orders?) and has a lot of very complex processing under the hood (over 200 distinct services called just to render the home page; search and recommendation engines; payments; inventory control; fraud detection; etc.). Then you can start to estimate just how much infrastructure they require.
  - neilc 17y ago
    Customer focus - having an insanely strong focus on the customer distinguishes them from equally innovative competitors like Google. I'm not so sure about that -- Google certainly claim (and intend) to be very strongly focused on the customer. Do you think Amazon are more effective at this than Google?
    - mbrubeck 17y ago
      Both are highly data-driven and responsive to customer metrics. But Amazon sees personalized customer support as a core value that they provide in-house. Google sees support as a pure cost, to be eliminated through automation. (That's not to say that Amazon is always great at support, but I do feel that there's a different attitude about it, having worked at Amazon and having many friends working at Google.)
njharman 17y ago
Because Bezos never thought of Amazon as (only) an online bookstore. And Amazon has not been just an online bookstore for a very long time.
daniel-cussen 17y ago
Its origins as a bookstore are incidental. Amazon started out as an online bookstore because Bezos knew the web (or web commerce, I'm not sure which) was growing at 2300% a year and wanted to get in on it in the best possible area. That area turned out to be books, because they were cheap to ship; required catalogs too large to print, but easy to browse through online; and had a large profit margin. It then expanded from there. It was and always will be about general online commerce.

cperciva 17y ago

It never ceases to amaze me how an online bookstore can be so ahead of all the self-professed hosting providers. Scale. It doesn't make sense to do things like this until you have thousands and thousands of nodes -- most hosting companies simply aren't anywhere near as big as Amazon.

akamaka 17y ago
I disagree. When Amazon started out, their datacenter couldn't have been nearly as big as those of top hosting companies. I can't imagine it would have taken more than a handful of Google-style shipping crates to host the site. I'd attribute their innovation more to their core values: Ignoring competitors - probably the biggest factor. They actually sat down and thought about what people want, rather than doing what everyone else was doing. This puts them ahead of traditional hosting providers, as well as competition-oriented companies like MS. Customer focus - having an insanely strong focus on the customer distinguishes them from equally innovative competitors like Google. Commitment - Amazon recognized from the start that they had limited resources, and very carefully chose to enter the cloud computing market, ignoring all the other proposals. This focused them more, while also giving the public more confidence in the service. Compare Google App Engine, which isn't taken with the same seriousness. Other than that, relative small size helps. Their customers know that Jeff won't eat them for lunch at the first opportunity. And having a few billion dollars of cash in the bank doesn't hurt either.
- cperciva 17y ago
  When Amazon started out, their datacenter couldn't have been nearly as big as those of top hosting companies. Sure. But they didn't do Reserved Instances and Spot Instances when they started out. You only need a few racks in order to make renting Xen instances by the hour feasible; but in order to make a market for Spot Instances reasonable, you need to have enough "spare" capacity to support a stable market (i.e., one where a single customer won't dramatically shift the market price) -- given the variety of instance sizes, I doubt this would work without having hundreds of racks of spare capacity.
  - akamaka 17y ago
    Gotcha, you were talking specifically about spot pricing. I read the OP's comment more as asking "Why are they so consistently innovative?".
- mbrubeck 17y ago
  "When Amazon started out, their datacenter couldn't have been nearly as big as those of top hosting companies. I can't imagine it would have taken more than a handful of Google-style shipping crates to host the site." If you're talking about when EC2 first started (2006), then I think you underestimate Amazon's scale by a couple orders of magnitude. For example, it's been a long time since Amazon has had "their datacenter" rather than many large datacenters around the world. [Note: I was an Amazon employee from 2005 to 2008.] Consider that Amazon had $10 billion in revenue in 2006, (how many pageviews does it take to end up with that many orders?) and has a lot of very complex processing under the hood (over 200 distinct services called just to render the home page; search and recommendation engines; payments; inventory control; fraud detection; etc.). Then you can start to estimate just how much infrastructure they require.
- neilc 17y ago
  Customer focus - having an insanely strong focus on the customer distinguishes them from equally innovative competitors like Google. I'm not so sure about that -- Google certainly claim (and intend) to be very strongly focused on the customer. Do you think Amazon are more effective at this than Google?
  - mbrubeck 17y ago
    Both are highly data-driven and responsive to customer metrics. But Amazon sees personalized customer support as a core value that they provide in-house. Google sees support as a pure cost, to be eliminated through automation. (That's not to say that Amazon is always great at support, but I do feel that there's a different attitude about it, having worked at Amazon and having many friends working at Google.)

njharman 17y ago

Because Bezos never thought of Amazon as (only) an online bookstore. And Amazon has not been just an online bookstore for a very long time.

daniel-cussen 17y ago

Its origins as a bookstore are incidental. Amazon started out as an online bookstore because Bezos knew the web (or web commerce, I'm not sure which) was growing at 2300% a year and wanted to get in on it in the best possible area. That area turned out to be books, because they were cheap to ship; required catalogs too large to print, but easy to browse through online; and had a large profit margin. It then expanded from there. It was and always will be about general online commerce.