1) Close to 70% of Amazon operating income once again can be attributed to AWS.
Consolidated operating income: $3,084 m AWS operating income: $2,121 m
2) AWS revenue was $8.3B for the quarter, 37% more than the same quarter last year.
The interesting number you left out was the non-AWS revenue, which in 2018 (too lazy to correlate with today's announcement) was $230B, literally 30x higher. AWS is a tiny drop in the bucket, no matter what the profit details say.
Which then prompts the question of why AWS gets that kind of margin, when it would seem like a pretty commoditized field at this point. Linux VMs are an open and very portable deployment platform. You can get them from any number of top tier providers and a huge horde of little ones. You'd expect to see a ton of competition driving prices down, but we don't. I genuinely don't know why.
And from an AWS / profit perspective, running the rest of Amazon is essentially what gives them a base consumer to get them to that scale.
It's that aggregate of so many individual clients that makes it difficult. So why aren't all the small clients getting picked off by the hundreds of small competitors?
My take is that the sheer scale of AWS has hit a point where engineers (the ones making infrastructure decisions) and moving from one company to another are just more likely to be familiar with AWS at this point. The same concept makes hiring easier.
My other guess is that lots of engineers are like me and just got sick of their hosting company getting bought out and constantly having to deal with console changes and migrations.
I am with GCP now, one of the reasons I picked GCP is because they are very large and have reasons to continue offering cloud services even if it becomes commoditized and unprofitable. The same is true for AWS.
Also, of course "no one ever got fired for choosing AWS".
AWS is fast food and expensive because consistency, availability, and volume are what count in the cloud business. You can get better quality VMs for less money but you won’t be able to provision thousands easily and it’s not going to be available 24/7.
McDonald's isn't impressive because they can make a Big Mac in 30 seconds. They're impressive because I can get almost the exact same Big Mac anywhere in the world.
You definitely don't want to run your RDBMS on Kubernetes, and while DO's "Marketplace" has a solution, it's not the same.
If you’re targeting AWS you’re probably better off using their solution, but you can totally run your database on k8s. And for some uses it’s even a good idea.
I've been doing this for a while. Before there were statefulsets, it was pretty painful. But now, it's relatively easy. Sure, not as easy as a PaaS database that seems to just work, but much easier than managing a cluster of servers with all sorts of crazy scripts.
Google Cloud has a ton of built-in support and UI for Kubernetes clusters. They make it really nice. It's roughly the same price, so I'm not sure I'd run Kubernetes on any other service.
Nope, wish I had time to devote to such a comparison. Would love to see an article.
* Access control for everything via IAM. This for me is the killer feature for AWS, almost anything from users, to servers, to individual IoT devices can be granted permission to access other AWS resources with extreme granularity.
* Audit logging of every single API call, user invoked or otherwise, via Cloudtrail.
* Monitoring of and responding to key metrics via Cloudwatch. This isn’t just graphs as it can appear on the surface, Cloudwatch alarms allow you to do things like killing individual servers if they start throwing errors while others aren’t.
* Responding to changes in your infrastructure via Cloudtrail. We’re using this for features ranging from emailing our security team when a new IAM user is provisioned, through to full release orchestration.
* All those features supported across services that can fulfil more or less any requirement you have, whether that’s a MySQL database, a message queue, or (should you really need it) a satellite downlink.
DO are fine if what you want really is just a server in a data centre somewhere, but you’re missing out on a lot of really powerful management features with them, without even getting into the other services AWS have.
At that scale the UI of the console really doesn't matter, everything is IAC so developers rarely need to directly access AWS. The one thing we do use is the Cost and Usage explorer which has a reasonable UI
Okay, but those "rare" times when you do need to access the infrastructure, having good UI is pretty helpful.
There is nothing to be discussed here. If you compare do with azure, google and aws and are talking about the interface being most important: you clearly are not the enterprisish client aws/azure/google is aiming for.
That might be unique to you, I've been using google and I've very much enjoyed the experience, why doesn't it work for you?
Ther is also a common believe that they will just drop support for something whenever they feel like it - which in regards to GCP could be unwarranted but well it is what it is. I would pick AWS first, Azure is becoming a close second and GCPa distant third. I think Digital Ocean looks awesome and might be worth a look before GCP.
Also, GCP is having stability issues recently.
Never underestimate the power of good aesthetics and design.
Server multiplexing.
Let's say I increase fleet utilization for 1%. My projected margin increase 1%, not retrospectively though. Plus the projected server hardware price drop. The margin increases naturally. If there were no competitor from Google and MSFT. Amzn would need to be extremely aggressive to not making a log of money.
That's why Google was very confident in winning the Cloud war back in early 2012-2014, and prior to that time frame. Google can operate fleet utilization way higher than industry standard, and clearly is ahead of Amzn then.
But it turns out a business is not that simple as writing code. And obviously, Amzn catches up in fleet efficiency. AFAIK, now Google and Amzn are almost head on head in that department, while Azure is the poor kid lagging behind. But that's not a problem for MSFT. Their strength is in enterprise and conventional developer community building.
Not sure what that says about Amazon in 2019, so.