Hacker News Reader

Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

Never? Their infrastructure is cool but it's only around half of what a public cloud would need.

Never... I'm not convinced. Rollback to when Amazon was pre AWS. Everybody thought they were crazy announcing they were getting into the datacenter and cloud business. I'd say it has worked out well for $AMZN.

> Everybody thought they were crazy announcing they were getting into the datacenter and cloud business.

All the comments I heard were positive about how they were diversifyiny by leveraging expertise they had been forced to develop for their own core platform, not that they were crazy. I'm sure there were some.who.said "crazy", but it definitely wasn't everyone.

I agree. Maybe Amazon sold it really well, but as far as I can remember, the response almost universally (including in financial circles) was that this was a great idea since it allowed them to leverage idle resources they needed to build out to handle peak loads (such as during the holiday season).

That never made sense. What happened during holiday season? Everyone on AWS was put on hold?

Amazon.com, even at its peak computing needs, is now a drop in the bucket.

Three years ago, in 2014, AWS was adding the equivalent hardware every day of what ran Amazon.com in 2004, when it was only a $700-million company. [1]

[1] https://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/11/14/rare-peek-massive-...

I don't know for sure but I'm guessing spot pricing for instances went way up.

Really? Let's take a look at the chart for 2006 when AWS was first introduced (as far as I can tell). Does not look like $AMZN stock really did anything positive in 2006. It is hard to find exact dates of when AWS products were released. Anybody know when EC2 went live to the public (full actual date)?

http://imgur.com/a/BIFQH

Sorry for linking to an image, but Google Finance link to this chart did not work. Sigh!

Request for a startup: Make a finance interface as good as Bloomberg terminals for the web.

I don't think that had anything to do with AWS.

Here's An article from 2006 regarding the earnings. AWS isn't mentioned. Drop in operating income and announcement of Groceries and Baby and Toy stores.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2006/07/the_...

Amazon didn't have to compete with AWS, Azure and GCP, Facebook does and Facebook doesn't have nearly as much of a record providing infrastructure to businesses. Cloud is a hard market to get into now.

Well, they could double it then and reap the benefits of scale.

Half in what sense?

In development effort. They have webscale datacenters, a hardware supply chain, OS provisioning, networking, object storage, etc. but AFAIK they don't have multitenant IaaS or PaaS, OSS/BSS, etc.

The other thing is that they are a decade behind AWS is that stuff they don't have... and AWS has been reinvesting all it's profits in that area. That's hard to catch up on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com