Hopefully it will not be just a half-assed experiment again.
That's like saying that the Wii was produced by a card-game company, or that a wood pulp paper making company makes the Lumia 900.
Companies evolve; Amazon were experienced in managing a lot of servers, and where looking for ways to make money on that expertise (and on the less than 100% used server capacity, although I remember hearing somewhere that within 3 months of introduction, AWS required more server capacity than Amazon-the-store had at the time)
Google has plenty of horsepower to spare, sure, but their usage pattern is much more planned for and expected, so launching a cloud required carving out resources for it, while Amazon just had to make use of excess resources it couldn't find a better use for.
I think you cannot deny that Amazon had "less to work with" when they started then Google has today. In terms of experience.
I was criticizing your expression. Amazon had A9 search and other ventures before AWS - they were far from being "an internet shop" even back then.
> I think you cannot deny that Amazon had "less to work with" when they started then Google has today. In terms of experience.
Indeed, but there was also less expectation. There wasn't any real competition, so they could get away with a hell of a lot less than Google can get with today.
I couldn't find the original, so this is a copy on Google+. It discusses the difference in how Google and Amazon approach platforms.
Cloud computing is all about creating a good blend of technology and business. If you don't get the business off the ground, you won't have the stamina to seriously invest in the technology, particularly in terms of building lean, scalable operations. Building scalable systems is perhaps 1% inspiration (distributed algorithms), and 99% transpiration (cost-effective operations). If you don't get it right, you'll be looking at this big red number below the line and will have to kill it. The fact that Google is already huge does not matter that much, it's not being big that's hard, it's growing fast and staying afloat.
Indeed, Amazon is an Internet shop. They'll sell anything to anyone, anywhere, and they do so for ridiculously low margins. That's a mighty competitor to be up against. Google on the other hand has never been very successful outside of advertising, and have only been a high margin business.
Not saying that Google won't be successful in this space. If they're willing to lose money on it they could achieve a sizeable market share comparable to Microsoft's. They lack Microsoft's gigantic sales network, but make up for in developer goodwill. However, catching up with the lean operations machine of Amazon seems infeasible at this point. What they could do is focus on their core strengths and open up their massive data sets and tools for all to use. So far they have been very reluctant to do so however, afraid to harm their core business.
Android is the most widely-used mobile OS in the world. Shouldn't that count as a success?
Google had build a highly customized, scaling environment based on their own software layer instead of mere "linux boxes". And clearly it worked great for them. So that's basically what they offered with GAE.
But the problem in the market was that GAE was this weird custom thing, while Amazon was selling a "cloudy" version of the same environment all the developers were already using. So Amazon won -- the market wants linux boxes, even if they aren't as scalable or efficient uses of hardware as Google's stuff.
The point is: Amazon won by circumstance. They happened to have an internal product already that they could sell, and they did. Google had an internal product too, but for reasons beyond the control of its designers, it wasn't a good fit for the market. I don't think either of these has anything to do with being "great at doing business".
The thought of dealing with Amazon customer service fills me with warmth. The thought of dealing with Google customer service fills me with dread.
I love Google as long as everything is working, but they (still) really suck when you need to interact with them. And before anyone mentions it, yes, I know this is because "I am Google's product", not their customer, but ultimately that viewpoint seems to have become part of Google's culture and in many ways that does actually make them lesser than Amazon at "doing business", IMO.
They're going to need to turn this around if they want to compete with Amazon, who have been very accommodating and helpful to us, even going so far as to send engineers to our offices to help us with aspect of our architecture.
I wasn't making a GAE vs. AWS comparison though. GAE is not in direct competition with AWS. It's a product with a niche market and I wouldn't see it as a failure. It's just something else entirely than building an AWS competitor.
The argument I was making is that Google wouldn't necessarily have the experience in building a lean, scalable business operation that could successfully compete with Amazon Web Services. As a case in point, Google has been running an exact duplicate of Amazon S3 for a while now, but it has yet to really take off. http://cloud.google.com/products/cloud-storage.html
EC2 and S3 today are virtually identical to the services they launched with. I don't think reality bears out your contention.
You're right that they had to add EBS later, but I think if anything that supports my point: the ephemeral "instance store" model was too weird, and customers really wanted something that acted like a virtual hard drive with persistent storage.
+1, no one ever seems to realize how important this aspect is. "Cloud" providers aren't competing with some fat margin software corp. AWS is a billion dollar business who's used to 1% margin, sinks 100s of millions in infrastructure, and is insulated from a lot of business pressures. Oh, and they control the vast majority of your market. That sounds like a pretty scary competitor.
And that sentiment is _exactly_ why I won't trust my business to whatever they come up with. There's no knowing how seriously and committed they are. Sure, Amazon could do an about face, but they don't have that history, so I'm more comfortable trusting them.
Amazon is pretty unique in that they make a lot of their internals available as products, but even before that, the infrastructure was still impressive. What other online store do you use? :)
But of course, i probably use Amazon for 80% of my online shopping needs, they rock!
MS seems to use Dell (only link i could find): http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/10/28/dell-...