
Amazon Web Services CEO: We’re a $30b revenue business in the ‘early stages’ - bovermyer
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/28/amazon-cloud-ceo-we-have-a-30-billion-run-rate-in-our-early-stages.html
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nakodari
I 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.

~~~
speeq
Here'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
>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/)

~~~
judge2020
All this means is that your main website, where these files are
embedded/served from, also needs to be on Cloudflare (and proxied).

~~~
dlhavema
I'm not sure that would follow

> disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML
> content, is prohibited.

If your video sharing app has any decent usage your ratios are gonna get in
their red zone pretty quick...

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stunt
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
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
Its the only serious use case for enterprise.

What, you want to use azure?

~~~
delecti
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.

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samstave
I 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
The first item in my wish list is a better and more intuitive Cloudformation.

So much busy work they’ve created around their platform.

~~~
NathanKP
This 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
I'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.

~~~
NathanKP
CDK does a lot more than just be an object oriented abstraction. Often times
one of the constructs in CDK actually makes many different underlying AWS
resources.

In CloudFormation its always a 1:1 mapping: one CloudFormation resource typed
out as YAML, one resource created on your AWS account. In CDK you can make
something like "LoadBalancedFargateService" and just plug in the path to your
local Dockerfile, and it builds and uploads the image to ECR, makes a Fargate
service, makes a load balancer, connects the service to the load balancer, and
returns the URL to you.

The other power of CDK is it sets things up right out of the box. Rather than
having to explicitly created all your autoscaling rules it can create sensible
default ones for you automatically. It also automatically creates the right
IAM rules, and security group rules that you would otherwise have to define
manually.

As a whole I'd say comparing CloudFormation and CDK is like comparing assembly
language and C++. You could write your code as a bunch of hand rolled ASM for
the most control, but realistically that's not feasible for large projects as
its error prone, slow, and quickly gets unwieldly. CDK is like higher level
C++ that synthesizes back down into the lower level assembly language that
creates all those cloud resources

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asien
Strongly 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 .

~~~
Thaxll
Europe is the next big cloud customer since they're always behind US for tech
adoption.

~~~
noir_lord
Always 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
Internet 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 :(

~~~
mrdodge
I pay $70 a month for gigabit AT&T fiber in a southern city, 10 miles from the
city center.

~~~
dajohnson89
in nyc, i pay $100 for gigabit

~~~
strictfp
Sweden.10Gbps for 30$ / month. It's kind of a long-running launch campaign,
but still.
[https://www.bahnhof.se/villafiber/](https://www.bahnhof.se/villafiber/)

~~~
yazr
Whats the typical bandwidth quota? Surely they wont let u saturate a 10gig
pipe ..

~~~
noir_lord
I've got 400Mbs/35Mbps with no cap (literally unlimited) which would cap out
at a round 4TB a day if I ever had a reason and could saturate it.

10Gbps domestically is insane though, that's pushing 100TB a day!.

------
ttul
Makes you wonder if one day AWS will overtake its parent.

~~~
reallydude
AWS carried Amazon out of mediocrity in 2008. It accounts for something like
70% of operating revenue. What does 'overtake' mean?

~~~
gergi
I'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
> 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.

------
techntoke
It is time for Kubernetes and other solutions to build a decentralized
federated cloud offering.

------
kennydude
Maybe they can get half of their services to work properly then?

------
appsonify
If 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
It 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.

