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> I already use Netflix for my video streaming.

To be fair, though, if AWS were to disappear your Netflix wouldn't work anymore. And given that it took them seven years [1] to move to AWS, I guess it would take them quite a while to move to Azure or Google or their own hardware.

For the logistics / shopping part I agree, though: I live in Switzerland, where Amazon doesn't ship much except for books and I have to say I don't feel I'm missing much. In fact, many local online stores which could develop because they weren't drowned by Amazon work better IMHO and at similar prices than the Amazon website.

[1]: https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-the-net...

I seriously doubt Netflix wouldn't find some way to rapidly move to some alternative if AWS were to disappear. But by all means correct me if I'm wrong!

Agreed. If they go as far as randomly disabling AWS nodes to test their own resilience I'd be shocked if they didn't have some sort of contingency for if AWS went completely belly-up. Who knows, they could even have Azure nodes on standby in case AWS in its entirety went down?

Everyone should have a cloud provider total-outtage strategy. You should atleast control the ability to move DNS if everything in said cloud provider is out.

Well, your question is not uncommon for people having little experiences developing and operating large distributed systems.

But I can guarantee you, if Netflix can, they already did, so to make them in a position better negotiate price with AWS.

You seriously think there is a provider somewhere sitting on 20 empty datacenters with all the hardware procured and hooked up just waiting on an off chance Netflix might switch?

I don't think the AWS datacenters would disappear in thin air either.

Well neither would warehouses and other infrastructure they built but that was not the premise that is being discussed.

You realize most of Netflix is not in AWS right?

You realize that netflix is using up over 20% of aws capacity and as cool as having your own cdn is there is not much purpose in it without the part that runs on AWS.

The part that runs in AWS could just as easily run on bare metal. Stack Overflow does it, Backblaze does it, Github does it; I'm so disappointed in this tired trite that your a special snowflake running in AWS.

Yes it would run even better but it would take a few years to do the buildout.

Nothing is going disappear overnight.. AWS iaas services are commodity and not something so unique that are not replaceable with products from other cloud vendors

At Netflix scale they are not replaceable by other vendors because other vendors do not have enough capacity to accommodate Netflix migration.

Can you provide information as to how much capacity Netflix would need to migrate? Otherwise, this comment has no basis in reality.

there are estimates that netflix is consuming about 20% of AWS. AWS does not publish a list of DCs but from regions and AZs you can put a lower bound estimate at 40 so it would be anywhere from 8 DCs to whatever the upper bound is (I guesstimated 20)

Whatever mysterious force wipes all trace of Amazon from the earth might help Netflix find someone to run some servers.

> Azure is a perfectly suitable replacement for AWS - VMs, storage, functions, etc. So is GCP, but I'm not familiar enough with it.

Sort of. If you are only ever using the basics such as EC2 and S3, then it is relatively easy to migrate. Use more services and it becomes a nightmare.

Heck, even with just EC2 it is already non trivial, think about a huge server deployment with a myriad of security groups and subnets that were fine tuned for years.

Indeed, AWS is still king. I doubt GCP or Azure would have anywhere near the capacity to handle all of the AWS customers. You're talking orders of magnitude, maybe 1000x? more compute power required - it's a different scale.

Judging by the Hacker News comments, it's google that has more capabilities than AWS.

If you follow comments about both, there are recurring ones of people who order 5000-15000 cores on Google for short computing intensive tasks whereas AWS didn't let them have thousandS. That forced them to switch.

I find that hard to believe.... 15000 cores is only 1000 16 core serversand my company has no problem with allocating those (300 per AZ) on a monthly basis, using them for a couple days and returning them.

> Truth be told, I'm not that big of a reader.

> Amazon is absolutely not irreplaceable for me, nor do I think it's irreplaceable for others.

I'm an avid reader, and I'd be seriously inconvenienced without Amazon. Selling books has become only a small part of what they do, but it's still the part I care most about.

Books are pretty much a commodity item there's plenty of places to buy books online and in person that aren't Amazon. There's nothing special about Amazon's books.

Sometimes I worry; I can't figure out how jet.com makes money shipping me 100 pounds of cat litter for no additional charge. I would think that the cost of shipping would be higher than what I paid for the litter.

gasoline is very very underpriced this days, it cant last,

>Azure is a perfectly suitable replacement for AWS - VMs, storage, functions, etc. So is GCP,

I started using just S3 in 2007, but fully moved my hosting on AWS by 2010. And never looked back. Their offering is the most mature, compared to competitors. And continuously improves, Few (random) examples:

1) They allow HTTPs breaking at the load balancer level, along with certificates you can just generate on the fly and use. Its so freakin' easy, you wouldn't believe, in comparison to, the process, if it was not there.

2) They keep on reducing prices on their own. As a customer you can't but feel glad when that happens.

3) Their DNS service (Route 53) is the easiest to configure I have seen. Having ran my own DNS, before it was released.

On top of that, there is a learning curve for any cloud. Which is as cumbersome as learning a new OS. Just like you will have to learn at least 10/20 commands before you can be productive on a new OS, same it is for cloud. E.g. How to build an image; how to spawn an instance; how to backup to S3; how to mount a volume; and so on...

Also the range and variety of instance types which you could get (memory intensive, compute intensive, from ultra small to the nxlarge ones)

There are also other reasons: Example, I tried to explore Google cloud, when it came out, but the sandbox model was not for me. So couldn't use it. I totally believe that its got better. But just my experience with it.

>but I'm not familiar enough with it.

You said it. If someone doesn't use mails, may equate gmail with Yahoo! mail or with Hotmail. Devil lies in the details.

edit: minor rephrase

> I normally just get books from a bookstore or library

Wow. Where do you live? I can't imagine being able to find 1/2 of the books I buy in any of the bookstores in San Francisco, for example.

otoh most "books" I buy these days are actually Kindle downloads, or on O'Reilly Safari.

There's plenty of other online retailers for physical books. Literally every book you can buy at Amazon you should be able to find somewhere else. And for digital books, there's other vendors there too (such as iBooks).

I avoid Amazon. I buy my books elsewhere and nothing Amazon has that I need can't be sourced somewhere else.

Name a single book you can buy on Amazon and not somewhere else.

You must have not looked elsewhere, I bought a whole series of decades out of print books and didn't touch Amazon.

>Jet.com/walmart is something I use already, and often prefer it to Amazon's own shopping. The website is cleaner which appeals to me. Shipping isn't quite as fast, but it's easily something I can live with. Half of what I get via Amazon doesn't ship via Prime, anyways.

This is an US centric view. There are very few services that ship worldwide, with such a large selection as Amazon, at more than reasonable prices, with two day delivery. Amazon is almost irreplaceable because they are the only ones that do it at such a scale. Aside from alibaba, but that means you are ordering in bulk.

Amazon is perfectly replaceable by the hundred of respective national competitors.

People might have switched to Amazon for price and/or convenience, they didn't forget the local past brand that served them for decade. In some places and some markets, Amazon is not even the leader.

I've used Jet and it's OK. The thing with Amazon is the 5% cash-back credit card you should be using with it, the ridiculous free shipping (seriously, I have no clue how they actually make money sending me a large box with $40 worth of stuff in it same-day), and the seriously easy returns or refunds if you need it.

One of the things about Amazon - they really don't make money. Actually, they are profitable, but only microscopically. All of that great stuff that we get shipped for free with 5% back costs a lot of money. The business model is to crush the competition then profit.

Worth reading about whether or not Amazon makes money:

http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/9/4/why-amazon-has-n...

http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2013/8/8/amazons-profits

> Truth be told, I'm not that big of a reader.

> which appeals to me

I think I can tell exactly what kind of person you are...