
Amazon’s Scorpion Problem - rmason
http://www.feld.com/archives/2014/07/amazons-scorpion-problem.html
======
blowski
I have no idea what the OP is talking about. As far as I can understand, the
author is saying Amazon (yes, Amazon) is not hard-nosed enough to win a fight
with Google and Microsoft.

#1 - "AWS is not the low price provider", "Being low priced is in Amazon’s
nature so this will be intensely challenging to them". This is true, but as
the market-leader, do they need to be?

#2 - "most of their features are mediocre knock offs of other products". As
@ToddMathews said here
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8104364](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8104364)),
he doesn't list any examples of these superior cloud services. I can't think
of any. Sure, ELB is a knock off of HAProxy, but in that sense, Gmail is a
knockoff of Postfix.

#3 - "AWS is unbelievably lousy at support", "Support is just not in Amazon’s
nature". Really? Compared to whom? In my experience, they have always been one
of the best providers of support of any online company.

#4 - "Once you are at $200k / month of spend, it’s cheaper and much more
effective to build your own infrastructure". And yet many businesses spend
more than $200k PCM. Are they stupid? Or is the author wrong?

~~~
Semaphor
Especially #3. Amazon is willing to let themselves be scammed before denying
free replacement products to customers.

~~~
x0x0
I've had very good customer service purchasing physical items from amazon.

ec2 and associated services' customer service and support has been pretty
shitty, and these are from companies paying anywhere from $8k to $96k/mo

~~~
blowski
I agree that their AWS support needs a lot of improvement, and there are
others in the industry (rackspace, peer one) who are better. But I disagree
with the OP's assertion that Amazon is inherently incapable of providing good
customer service in any of its markets.

~~~
Semaphor
That was exactly my point :)

------
toddmatthews
"AWS is not the best product at anything – most of their features are mediocre
knock offs of other products."

Does not list a single example.

~~~
dasil003
Elastic Transcoder is a good example. They don't even support variable
bitrate, so you have to choose between huge files and video that looks good
for a while until you hit some dark scenes or high contrast sequences that
exhibit terrible artifacting.

------
femto113
Anyone who makes the blanket assertion that "AWS is not the best product at
anything" is failing to grasp the fundamental advantage of AWS--it is the only
(and therefore best and cheapest) "full line" IAAS provider. Obviously simple
value added services like Dropbox that primarily leverage just one piece of
the cloud (storage) will eventually move to wherever (and everywhere) that
they can get their infrastructure cheapest. When complex services like Netflix
begin moving off of AWS is when I'd start worrying.

~~~
opendais
Eh? What do you consider "full line"?

I'm pretty sure Netflix uses it due to the highly variable usage situation. It
never makes sense to have a server sitting idle for 23 hours a day.

~~~
femto113
I think "full line" isn't an entirely static concept in IAAS, but I'm using it
here to suggest there's no other player offering the same breadth of services.
I haven't surveyed other providers in detail lately, but I expect for any
given competitor it wouldn't take you long to find some AWS service
([http://aws.amazon.com/products/](http://aws.amazon.com/products/)) that they
simply don't have an equivalent for.

EDIT: found someone who's made a feature grid here:
[http://www.planforcloud.com/pages/resources/cloud_services.h...](http://www.planforcloud.com/pages/resources/cloud_services.html)

This doesn't even include more esoteric stuff like Redshift and Elastic
Beanstalk.

------
andlarry
> AWS is unbelievably lousy at support.

Compared to whom? Google? How many times have you seen tickets like [1] for
Android, Gapps, etc? Additionally, the google cloud platform onboarding was so
bad, I almost gave up a $500 credit in frustration.

[1]
[https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/HTX9cLb...](https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/HTX9cLb3E3o)

~~~
smacktoward
Rackspace leaps to mind.

~~~
lwhalen
Rackspace's support is indeed fantastic, however their product is
significantly more friction-ful to use (I'm currently at a company that has
purchased a Rackspace Private Cloud, and uses it in conjunction with their
public cloud). It works as advertised, kinda-sorta and with a whole lot of
spit, duct-tape, and prayer, but I'd much rather use Amazon's system and deal
with one support ticket every other quarter, than the weekly support ticket(s)
using Rackspace's product seems to require.

~~~
tacticus
Is their private cloud still vmware based or have they finished rolling out
the openstack solutions?

~~~
lwhalen
Yes, it's all Openstack at this point (at least our environment is. The
'Havana' release)

------
iancarroll
I call bullshit on the support and the "knockoff" claim. I've always felt they
are the best with support - they've even waived an accidental $120 instance
for me. Yhe tools they provide me are exemplary and cannot be replaced IMO.

------
danielweber
What does this have to do with "scorpion"?

From the title, I thought it would be about Amazon competing with its
customers, like Netflix using AWS to compete with Amazon Prime, and how its
inevitable that Amazon will eventually have to sting Netflix.

~~~
x0x0
amazon now is actively parasitic to marketplace vendors: they find the best
selling products and compete directly. At some point this has to impact
willingness for small shop owners to essentially show their books to amazon,
right?

~~~
opendais
Yes, but that is a MWS issue not an AWS issue.

------
callesgg
$200k that is insane, it is cheaper to go width own hardware long before that.

The server room we have at our office have had max 5 hours of total down time
since 2011 And we have moved our entire office under that period. I will try
to estimate our general costs in EUR.

Inital costs for servers, switches, cooling, Racks UPS 150K

Replacement of servers every 3-4 years 60K/3 = 20K

Internet line = 10K a year

Electricity = 2K a year

Consulting cost for hardware maintenance = 10K

Old servers we put those in an a room a bit away and use them for
backups/failsafe.

That is about 50K a year.

Counting in initial costs and just cause is is till almost nothing compared to
200K a month, I would say that switching to self hosting is financially
beneficial when getting to about 10K a month with 3party hosting.

~~~
eco
Without numbers showing the actual quantities involved this cost comparison is
kind of useless. Not that I doubt going with your own hardware is cheaper at
those levels, it's just not a conclusion I can draw from what you've written.
Also, as others said, labor costs need to be factored in.

How much would a comparable setup cost on AWS per year? Once we know that we
can draw conclusions.

~~~
callesgg
We did calculations on that about 2 years ago, then it was about 700K pear
year.

But that left out some cost like Shared network folders that our users use, so
we would have needed to get some kind of replacement for our netapp(a form as
NAS).

------
guiambros
I respect Brad and usually enjoy his posts, but this one is full of s...

He doesn't give a single example of why " _AWS is not the best product at
anything_ ". This is obviously true, but the same could be said about Google,
Microsoft, or Rackspace. So what's the point? Who has a better offering?

The discussion of AWS being more expensive than bare metal is valid, but
that's an obvious statement. Amazon uses bare metal (albeit at scale), and
adds their application stack + support. You're paying for the convenience of
purchasing all services integrated from a single vendor. If your business is
simple enough and you can just throw hardware and bandwidth to solve your
needs, then bare metal will always be cheaper. But for more complex
environments (e.g., multi-regions, global distribution, auto-scaling), or when
you need to quickly scale up and down (to accomodate surge in demand, for
example) bare metal is not an option.

Net net, this sounded like a rant against Amazon's world domination plans, and
the threat to the very existence of some of the companies on his fund. He said
it best:

 _" We used to think of Amazon as a potential acquirer for these companies, or
at least a powerful strategic partner. Now we know they are just using the
bait of “we want to work more closely with you” as market and product
intelligence."_

If your business model depends on a _strategic_ partnerships with or being
acquired by Amazon, you're doing it wrong.

------
mark_l_watson
That was a strange article.

Isn't it a self obvious truth that AWS is most appropriate when you need lots
of computational resources in bursts?

If you often need many extra servers for a short period of time, then AWS is
really good for that. Another thing that AWS provides is some very handy
infrastructure APIs like S3, DynamoDB, Eleastic Mapreduce, etc.

For flat usage scenarious, then renting beefy VPSs or physical servers is more
cost effective.

------
liveoneggs
where do people get these numbers? You should move to physical hardware well
before $200k/month.

~~~
__john
Do you have a source or some insight you could share as to when a company
should move away from AWS? A quick google search turns up $1000 per square
foot[1] for a buidling a datacenter. There's also a nice discussion on
reddit[2], but there's no talk of cost. I think this is an interesting
economics? problem and would like to hear more on it if anyone has the time.

[1][http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=920078](http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=920078)
[2][http://redd.it/16m9pq](http://redd.it/16m9pq)

~~~
liveoneggs
I can tell you that you can rent an entire rack with power for
$500-$1000/month (42U);

A decent internet connection from level3 or the colo house internet for
another few hundred.

So even at $2k/month we've still got $180k/month to buy servers and storage
(or $2M for the year).

$200k/month is a lot of money.

~~~
eli
What if your usage isn't evenly distributed across a month?

~~~
vampirechicken
Chances are that your colo datacenter is building out an openstack-based cloud
offering.

So you build your colo'd private cloud on openstack, and then use their's to
handle surges. As your traffic grows, you add your own gear to handle the base
line.

But ~200K per month, you're operating at a very different scale from 2k or
even 20k. Having a couple of idle servers 23 hours a day is not wasteful at
that scale, unless your CIO is Ebeneezer Scrooge.

------
orandolabs
We (Orando Labs, [https://orandolabs.com](https://orandolabs.com)) feel the
sting of the scorpion. Check out EnduroSync vs Cognito at
[http://orandolabs.wordpress.com/2014/07/12/amazon-
cognito/](http://orandolabs.wordpress.com/2014/07/12/amazon-cognito/)

------
mark-r
Does Google also have the "lousy at support" problem? Their DNA has always
favored algorithmic approaches that scale vs. human contact which doesn't. I
remember hearing horror stories when they first came on the scene.

~~~
callesgg
I actually find that google has quite good support (where they have support)
Google Apps for business for example.

------
ForHackernews
"While we are in the middle of a massive secular shift from owned data centers
to outsourced data centers"

A secular shift? As opposed to a religious one?

~~~
ghaff
Secular also has a meaning of once in a long time or once in an age. One
source I looked at says that the Latin root in also the root for "century" in
Romance languages. I could argue it doesn't add much to that sentence (which I
don't really agree with in any case) but it's not an incorrect use of the
word.

~~~
ableal
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_saecula_saeculorum](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_saecula_saeculorum)
: "The _saeculum_ in Roman antiquity was the potential maximal human lifespan,
or roughly a century"

