
Amazon adds ocean freight to the pieces of the shipping puzzle it controls - nh
https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/25/amazon-adds-ocean-freight-to-the-pieces-of-the-shipping-puzzle-it-controls/
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inopinatus
"Amazon is a logistics company" is a common refrain. It's obviously a core
capability and essential to the journey from "bookshop" to "general purpose
two-sided global end-to-end fulfilment platform" via ships, drones, planes,
self-driving trucks, automated warehousing and so on. This is hardly a
surprise but it's still instructive to understand that AWS is also a logistics
monster.

There's a quote from James Hamilton from 2014, "Every day, AWS adds enough new
server capacity to support all of Amazon’s global infrastructure when it was a
$7B annual revenue enterprise (in 2004)." The actual number of facilities
elements, computing & storage units is not specified but, you know, it's
obviously _a lot_ , and that was three years ago. Imagine the supply chain &
logistics required for that constant growth. Layer on the step function of
adding each new region or AZ. Realise there's a lag between demand and
fulfilment, and consider the impact of failing to meet a demand projection
because something shipped late.

Every global public cloud probably shares similar concerns, but I think one
reason AWS got to be a first mover is the logistic capability burned into
Amazon's DNA.

obdisclosure: I'm ex-AWS, opinions are my own, all facts above are public.

