Amazon Web Services CEO: We’re a $30b revenue business in the ‘early stages’
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
This doesn't make any sense. Getting out is a one time operation, vs paying a higher recurring fee.
And yes Snowball goes both ways: you can get data into AWS or out of AWS.
Ignoring the fact you lose all metadata transferring via snowball and any ACLs depending on the type of data and where you pulled it from. You can't pull from anything BUT S3 either. So that database? Sorry, online. The Glacier archive? Going to have to rehydrate it first.
The $250 is a rounding error for sure, but not on the cost of the data, on the cost of restoring the data. Even S3 itself you're ignoring the fact that you've got $2,500 in transfer fees alone on that 80TB.
I suppose that could be interpreted as ~50% margins, rather than ~90%. Not sure how that calculation is actually supposed to be performed.
You could store files in a Backblaze B2 bucket and serve them via Cloudflare with zero bandwidth fees. Or try DigitalOcean's Spaces offering with their built-in CDN at $0.01/GB for bandwidth.
Hardware video encoding could be done using cheap Hetzner servers that include GTX 1080 GPU's (lookup NVENC) or try Intel Quick Sync encoding (perhaps using OVH's overclocked i7-7700K CPU's).
From Cloudflare's TOS [0]:
>2.8 Limitation on Non-HTML Caching
>The Service is offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as a part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Service solely for the purpose of serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other application and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) protocol or other equivalent technology. Use of the Service for the storage or caching of video (unless purchased separately as a Paid Service) or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited.
Of course Cloudflare offers commercial plans that feature video CDN, but it will cost you and it will cost you similarly to other video CDN providers.
> disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited.
If your video sharing app has any decent usage your ratios are gonna get in their red zone pretty quick...
E: typo
"Google has never revealed YouTube's revenue" but you can quantify it (roughly) from known values and costs.
Ultimately profitability of a product within Alphabet depends on how you want to categorize technology within Alphabet. DFP and YT, at the very least, are separate products.
We are in early stages and the monopoly will get worse.
What, you want to use azure?
Software? Does Amazon have have a monopoly on strong technical workers or patents? Not sure about the ladder, but certainly not the former.
Capital? Cloud hosting is probably capital intensive but there is plenty of interested parties with capital.
Legislation? Probably a lot lower barrier to entry than other industries, although I'm not sure.
It could just be that they are executing better than the others.
Even if you have 100 billion dollars in the bank, you're years behind. Go buy land, build datacenters (5 year lead time), sign power contracts with utility providers, figure out where to buy all your dram and disk and networking and shit and oh develop your cloud services too. Now keep them running.
Building out those services is a monumental task requiring loads of experts in their respective fields (databases, storage, networking, etc). I see this as at least as much of a hurdle as the capital expenditure.
To add on to your point: Amazon told Jassy in 2003/2004 to take 55 engineers and build out some cloud services they could sell to customers. ~6 years later, Microsoft decides to enter the market.
That is an epic first-to-market timeline.
Not only do you have to have the physical infrastructure to launch a region (expensive in and of itself), you pretty much have to have the infrastructure to launch at the minimum two regions geographically separated in some form. Plus with data locality laws increasingly enter the mix (something that AWS never had to worry about until they were already a success), you increasingly have to build regions everywhere or customers can't use you. Frankfurt, for example, is a virtual given.
That's before you even start to consider all the engineering work involved writing the code to run the cloud services.
Once you had enough demand to merit your own data centers, then would go ahead and build them. Thats what most VPSs do.
Some things that I think can still happen on AWS, if not already happening:
VPC Images!
Basically a VPC launch button that has a series of terraform/*form rules that deploy a SaaS-in-a-box:
Meaning, VPC images of infra to support a business case.
Want to start up an infra that can receive video uploads and display them on a portal? Click here.
etc...
So much busy work they’ve created around their platform.
For context I've been able to take thousands of lines of CloudFormation YAML and replace it with around 500 lines of much clearer and easier to read JavaScript. And that 500 lines automatically builds five Lambda functions, builds, pushes, and launches two Docker images that run in AWS Fargate, configures an API Gateway and a CloudFront distribution.
CDK is really a game changer in terms of allowing developers to take an idea and turn it into infrastructure as code extremely quickly and properly (CDK automatically generates many best practices like minimal IAM roles, minimal security group settings, etc)
In CloudFormation its always a 1:1 mapping: one CloudFormation resource typed out as YAML, one resource created on your AWS account. In CDK you can make something like "LoadBalancedFargateService" and just plug in the path to your local Dockerfile, and it builds and uploads the image to ECR, makes a Fargate service, makes a load balancer, connects the service to the load balancer, and returns the URL to you.
The other power of CDK is it sets things up right out of the box. Rather than having to explicitly created all your autoscaling rules it can create sensible default ones for you automatically. It also automatically creates the right IAM rules, and security group rules that you would otherwise have to define manually.
As a whole I'd say comparing CloudFormation and CDK is like comparing assembly language and C++. You could write your code as a bunch of hand rolled ASM for the most control, but realistically that's not feasible for large projects as its error prone, slow, and quickly gets unwieldly. CDK is like higher level C++ that synthesizes back down into the lower level assembly language that creates all those cloud resources
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/CDK/latest/userguide/what-is.htm...
Unfortunately it does still appear to be in preview.
In U.S , one way or another everything is running in the cloud.
For Europe ? It’s more complicated , most large businesses still have their own datacenters or run using dedicated machine with European hosting (OVH).
I’ve worked for many differents banks and they barely use the cloud compared to startups like N26 or Revolut.
Same thing for Industries or Health Services they largely run « On Premise » compared to U.S equivalent.
There is still room for growth from Europe if they manage to convince leaders of large corporations that the cloud will not take the their sovereignty away from them .
France had usable networked computers everywhere long before the us did (it was called minitel)
Over on the UK my local Telco (not BT) was doing video on demand over copper ~2000, they where also one of the first to switch a fully packet switched internal backbone (so successfully other telcos came to look at how they did it).
We had chip and pin a decade before the US.
Our median internet connection is better.
Is the US the world leader sure, always ahead..not so much.
We are more on the expensive of Europe. My subscription is pretty cheap though.
200Mbps in the entire country would be around 55€ ( internet only)
Europe has 4 of top 5 of the fastest broadband countries in the works.
Romania (#5 in speed), goes as low as 7€/month.
Also, I'm pretty sure that the richest in Romania has a much higher income than the poorest in America. But they still pay the same price.
Ps. What if you reference it with social health care in Romania vs US. Not everybody works, you know.
10Gbps domestically is insane though, that's pushing 100TB a day!.
Then there is the fact that a decade on the numbers are in; Cloud isn't any cheaper at the scale of most established businesses AWS wants to court. Often it's more expensive.
None of this will actually slow adoption. It probably should, but it won't.
History is there for analysis. The stock falling to April2007 levels in Sept2008 showed serious volatility and hadn't yet declared profits that carried it above Sun and Toy R Us yet. It was somewhere in the top 300 profitable companies. It was still carrying the HUGE debt load that they have been carrying over to enable yet another tax free year in 2018, despite another record year. Quite a bet to make that they would be successful where AWS was just exiting beta. It was completely orthogonal to their barely-on-track online retail business model. It was a meh company and the stock price reflected that.
I know people have been on the edge about serverless in the past but it's now reached a point where I'm planning to actively employ them. 2019, will be the Year of Serverless methinks.