Amazon's next billion-dollar business eyed

As much as I want to laugh (and maybe even cry) at this, it does bring up a good point. Not so much in the content, but the fact that it exists in the first place.

I imagine that for almost everyone on HN the "revelation" of this article is comically obvious. However, I have had countless clients who were interested in testing the waters for hosting or HPC work and were committed to sinking a lot of cash into in-house machines up front. I almost always suggest experimenting with AWS and then moving on from there. More than 1/2 of the time I get a bug-eyed look, not because they are skeptical of AWS, they just have no idea what it is.

How I could I miss AWS for so long?! ;p

Well, its because it was a "secretive unit"

I literally laughed out loud at this particular example of journalistic cluelessness. Haven't done that since, well, the Louise Boat.

Perhaps "secretive unit" was in reference to "Amazon doesn't disclose AWS results"? Still seems rather odd, though.

It seems pretty likely that AWS on its own would be worth >$1b right now. Probably $5-10b in the current market, just based on adoption.

It's pretty weak for enterprise/internal/corp use, vs. web startup, but I could see them expanding over time.