
How Long Can AWS Keep Climbing Its Steep Growth Curve? - jonbaer
http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/02/01/how-long-can-aws-keep-climbing-its-steep-growth-curve/
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tyingq
I happen to spend a fair amount of time in and around non-tech Fortune 500
companies. Almost all of them still have either their own data centers, or a
"we'll run your mess for less" type contract (non-cloud) with companies like
Rackspace, HP, etc. I suspect the same applies for government agencies at all
levels.

I would guess that a fair amount of the potential cloud growth is in migrating
all of that to the cloud, either as an actual migration, or as some new
solution built in a cloud that retires an in-house hosted solution.

The eventual consolidation of all of that into a pretty small number of big
players (Amazon/Google/Microsoft) is a bit concerning in that the reduced
diversity of solutions opens up some security, reliability, competitive cost,
etc, concerns.

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toomuchtodo
> I would guess that a fair amount of the potential cloud growth is in
> migrating all of that to the cloud, either as an actual migration, or as
> some new solution built in a cloud that retires an in-house hosted solution.

Depends on the workload. If your workload is predictable, and you don't need
"scale to infinity on a dime", buying your own hardware and amortizing over
3-5 years is typically much cheaper (~40% savings, roughly) than what AWS
offers.

~~~
tyingq
Amazon seems to be having success selling AWS as a landing point for things
that are predictable and don't need instant scaling.

Edit: The context here is about non-tech Fortune 500 companies, Government
Agencies, etc...and the very large amount of existing "non cloud" opportunity
they present for the likes of Amazon. Think General Mills, American Airlines,
CVS, Kroger, etc.

For example: [https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-
studies/dole/](https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/dole/)

Sure, it's odd they think running Sharepoint on AWS is saving them money, but
they moved :)

~~~
toomuchtodo
Lots of people sell things people don't need. There's something to be said for
marketing.

Github and Stackoverflow, to name two that come to mind, run on their own
hardware in a datacenter. Backblaze built out its own storage system in a
datacenter due to how much cheaper it was than AWS' S3 system.

I think AWS is a wonderful system to prototype in, before you move to your own
gear if you're profitable. But every dollar you spend in AWS is gone once its
spent; with new US Section 179 deduction rules, you can immediately write off
$500K/year in hardware costs. That means that you own that hardware forever.
That might not matter to a Fortune 50 or 500 business, but it matters _a lot_
to small to midsized businesses.

Disclaimer: I do devops/infrastructure, and love AWS, but also don't believe
in spending more than you must for a solution.

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jedberg
150 years ago, everyone generated their own energy. 100 years ago, most larger
users still generated their own energy. Over time, almost everyone migrated
"to the grid" because the centralized power companies did it better, cheaper
and more reliability.

I suspect the same will happen with computing. At this point most of the
smaller players (startups) are using AWS or another cloud provider. Some of
the more bleeding edge larger companies are doing it too. Eventually even the
largest companies will move "to the cloud", leaving only the very largest
companies (who incidentally still generate their own energy even today)
running their own servers.

~~~
beachstartup
you're talking about the power grid like it's some monolithic entity like
amazon -- it's not. every region has its own, and sometimes multiple, power
companies. some are public. LA DWP coexisting with edison is a good example of
this.

there's also a high degree of regulation to make sure this stuff works
together. see: rolling blackouts.

~~~
jedberg
Oh I wasn't saying it would all be Amazon. I'm saying it will all be 3rd party
clouds. The number of providers is up for grabs.

~~~
beachstartup
i certainly hope so. amazon is looking to be the next microsoft of the 90s.

i think most people are just too young to remember how horrendously bad it is
when one company owns most of the market.

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EGreg
Am I the only one who is worried about "the cloud" phenomenon centralizing a
lot of the internet under the control of a few companies?

I think it mostly has to do with the client-server technology of the web
today. Once effective technology exists to decentralize key aspects of the
platform - hosting, accounts, etc. - you'll see less consolidation in one
provider. You'll also see a lot less feudalism when it comes to the power
dynamics of users and organizations vs services (like Uber, Facebook, Google,
etc.)

There needs to be a protocol to decentralize social the way bitcoin
decentralized money.

Disclaimer: I'm working on just such a protocol and reference implementation
([http://qbix.com/platform/features/distributed](http://qbix.com/platform/features/distributed))

~~~
floppydisk
One of the other commenters already pointed out services like Docker are
letting us abstract away from the specifics and just run the software wherever
there's an OS that'll take it. That reduces the hold any one provider can have
and forces them to compete on price / features rather than technology lock-in.
If one of them implements a requirement you must use their standard APIs for
XYZ, then you're probably going to get a mass exodus.

Longer term, I think Amazon's cloud will continue to eat market share,
especially as an entirely new generation of techies comes online whose only
experience has been working with AWS and other cloud providers. Kind of like
the transition from desktop software in the 80s/90s to server-based web apps
in the 90s-early 00s. If you're building a company / app today, the first move
is to go to the cloud and get on AWS. That's the "safe" business move now
rather than spending capital to buy hardware, getting a sysadmin, etc. etc.
etc.

For the market, I'm hoping we see someone develop a set of common APIs that
abstract away common specifics across AWS/Google Cloud/Azure and let you run a
generic web stack and dynamically move parts of your app around based on
pricing. If Google drops below AWS and your demand is spiking, you setup new
instances on Google, rather than spinning up AWS instances, and use a micro
service API to interact with the database. Behind the scenes, the API layer
tracks the different clouds you configured for and dynamically moves most
pieces of your application except data storage as your target conditions
change. I envision spot cost, demand, latency, and host availability /
provisioning time all playing a role in this cost algorithm. Eventually you
end up with agnostic applications that don't ever live anywhere. They migrate
and dynamically adjust across different clouds turning each individual cloud
in part of a larger, more agnostic cloud for some services.

~~~
23david
Looking at the datacenter locations for AWS, Azure, GCE, Linode, softlayer and
DO, it'd be challenging to develop reliable multi-cloud datacenter agnostic
apps with any consistent backend datastore requirements. In the end, you may
get better availability and performance if you do things carefully, but I
think the cost savings won't be there unfortunately.

~~~
code777777
Walmart is releasing OneOps. It's supposedly their internal platform to be
cloud-provider agnostic. I've not used it (yet) and haven't heard of anyone
else using it but it sounds like a step in that direction.

[http://www.walmartlabs.com/2015/10/walmartlabs-oneops-
open-s...](http://www.walmartlabs.com/2015/10/walmartlabs-oneops-open-source/)

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dsugarman
I wonder how much a slowdown in VC investment would hurt their sales. They are
a great operating unit, I really wish they would break it apart from Amazon
major.

~~~
lowglow
It depends on what level VC we're talking, and what % of their IaaP service is
purchased by said service.

There might be a hiccup in earnings if the tech sector crashes.

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LukaAl
The article is interesting, but it fails to consider one aspect. AWS is a line
of products, very broadly defined, instead of a single product, with different
level of maturity. You go from services like EC2 that are IAAS to RDS and co.
that are PAAS to some foray into SAAS.

I don't have first-hand insights, but my guess is that Amazon is working on
many more products and offerings. And if it's not Amazon, are company running
on AWS.

So, I'm pretty sure that having a break-down of the internal numbers between
service we could see many different growth curves superimposed. Some that
still experience exponential growth, other still grow but with a slow-down.
The sum is still an exponential curve.

tl;dr: The growth will profile will depend a lot on the pace of product
innovation AWS is able to provide. And that's different from, for instance,
the Amazon Marketplace where the only innovation is going after a new
category.

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chucky_z
As a consumer of AWS's services, every time I start to think "I could really
use this service..." or I have a "If AWS had this..." thought, they seem to
release something that addresses this concern. If they added multicast within
VPC I would be the happiest lil' AWS camper.

