Comments for Amazon Web Services: Bigger Than Amazon

Amazon Web Services: Bigger Than Amazon

2008-01-31T02:32:33Z

Web retailer Amazon announced their fourth quarter earnings today and included some interesting figures on the state of their distributed computing products. Namely, web services bandwidth now accounts for more bandwidth than all of Amazon's global web sites combined. To put this in perspective, comScore ranked Amazon the 7th most visited site in the US in December. The retail giant was 6th in the UK, 9th in Canada, 11th in Germany, 11th in Japan, and 20th in France. In other words -- Amazon is big, which means AWS-powered sites must be really big (collectively, at least).

]]>

Adoption of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) continues to grow. As an indicator of adoption, bandwidth utilized by these services in fourth quarter 2007 was even greater than bandwidth utilized in the same period by all of Amazon.com’s global websites combined.

As TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld points out, "That means startups and other companies using Amazon’s Web-scale computing infrastructure now bigger collectively than Amazon.com, at least as measured by bandwidth usage."

Amazon also announced that there are now over 330,000 developers registered to use Amazon Web Services (AWS), an increase of 30,000 developers in the last quarter. Adoption of Amazon's platform is very likely helped by the over 200,000 developers who have signed up to use Facebook's platform. Amazon recently launched a specialized page for Facebook developers in an effort to court app developers to the AWS platform.

In November, Robert Scoble was in disbelief about the prospect of a serverless Internet company. Because of Amazon's web services, anyone can build a scalable web site without actually owning a single server -- and many companies are utilizing the service to do just that. "Let’s get this straight. Amazon used to be a book store," he wrote. "Now they are hosting virtualized servers for Internet companies."

A little over a year ago, Alex Iskold wrote about the Amazon web services stack, saying that it was "evidence of a new computing paradigm, where web services in aggregate give rise to a new web-based operating system." But Alex also conceded that small and medium sized businesses would be the first to get on board with Amazon's web scale computing platform. "Wall Street is not going to jump on this," he wrote.

Amazon's AWS success stories page still doesn't include any fellow members of the Fortune 500, but it does include a number of successful or well-funded web 2.0 start ups. The usage numbers released today indicate that even though Amazon isn't making a ton of money from their web services (TechCrunch guesses that AWS revenue was part of the $131 million "Other" category for the 4th quarter -- which includes other services and isn't much of the $5.7 billion in total Q4 revenue), they are striking a chord with developers and positioning themselves as a major provider of infrastructure services for an entire generation of web applications.

Comment from Amazack on 2008-01-30

2008-01-31T06:24:00Z

This is exciting to see announced, because we've known about it internally at Amazon for some time. It's suddenly kind of strange to think that in a way, we're now not a retailer in the business of internet infrastructure, but an internet infrastructure provider with a retail side business.

Well, not really: I guess most of the money still comes from the retail stuff. For now. :-)

Comment from BIll on 2008-01-31

2008-01-31T09:03:49Z

We've tried to use EC2 (or whatever it's called now) and would love make use of this facility especially as you can now choose the size not just the number of instances to use. However, there are two problems for anyone wanting to create a real applications: fixed IP addresses and storage persistence.

The advocated solution to the lack of fixed IP addresses in the EC2 environment is to use a dynamic DNS service. This our view this is not viable. Of course you could just make sure your machine instances.

The second is harder to resolve adequately. Our applications are LAMP stacks so there's a real database there. While each instance comes with plenty of space for data, if the instance terminate - for whatever reason - the data is gone. This isn't the same as a real machine where the disk is probably there when the machine is rebooted. So backup to S3 has to be almost continuous which consumes both storage resources and CPU time.

Comment from Mark on 2008-01-31

2008-01-31T10:55:30Z

Whatever success Amazon is having with EC2 would be greatly increased if they were sort the above two issues.

My main concerns are the:

- Dynamic IP
- Data loss on termination of instances
- Lack of a SLA (last time I looked)
- Steep learning curve for setup etc

If they were to launch a GUI for EC2 and S3 (and the other AWS too) then I would use Amazon for hosting my apps without question. There are third party solutions but you have to share your Amazon private key so that they connect on your behalf, and it costs.

I am assuming that they will eventually address these issues. Maybe they are using them to keep things manageable. I am surprised that Google have not followed suit, I guess they will do things their own (often better) way.

Comment from Patrick Kerpan on 2008-01-31

2008-01-31T17:41:51Z

We have addressed some of the DNS issues referenced above using a bit of open source we put together called VcubeV. This blog post explains: http://elasticserver.blogspot.com/2008/01/introducing-vcubev.html

Secondly, regarding UI's to EC2, we have a service which speeds up AMI construction pretty dramtically. (Although we do want your credentials if you want auto-upload and auto-deploy to EC2). Here is a walkthrough: http://www.cohesiveft.com/Elastic_Server/Community/Elastic_Server_Walkthroughs/

Comment from Tony on 2008-01-31

2008-01-31T18:14:11Z

In related news, it was just announced that amazon is buying Audible (downloadable audio books)... seems like a no-brainer for amazon. Here's the story from the Associated Press

Comment from Oliver Taco on 2008-02-09

2008-02-09T19:53:12Z

There are a HOST (haha) of reasons not to outsource infrastructure to Amazon. You can follow the link under my name, but I can also summarize:

It ain't Amazon's core business. Note even close.

-OT