Amazon mints a BILLION BUCKS from its cannibal cloud

Amazon's cloud division has brushed off competition from Google and Microsoft to report record revenue of $1.234bn, and grew its business abroad to historic highs as well. Amazon took in $1.234bn in cash in its "other" revenue segment in the fourth quarter of 2013, the company announced on Thursday, up from $1.011bn in the …

[Nate Amsden]

because of dumb shits like this

http://www.geekwire.com/2014/moz-posts-2013-5-7m-loss/

They are spending 25 % of their REVENUE on cloud services. REVENUE -- for them that comes to over $7 million in 2013.

There are a lot of clueless companies out there... it makes me sick.

so clueless..

[AndyS]

Re: because of dumb shits like this

I'm struggling to see why that automatically counts as clueless. They're a computing company, selling computing services for customers with computing needs - of course a large chunk of their costs are going to be for computing.

It's as if you just pointed at First group, and said "They spend 25% of their revenue on diesel! Clueless." Yeah. They run buses & trains. They need a lot of the stuff.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but a company spending a lot on one thing, even if it's a thing you don't personally use much of, doesn't make them automatically clueless.

[Oh Homer]

You misspelled "BEELION"

Just sayin'.

[Angol]

Re: You misspelled "BEELION"

Thank you for telling us.

[disk iops]

Amazon is NOT cheaper than self-run CO-LO

I built infrastructure for a similar marketing analytics firm in Reston and we saved a BUNDLE compared to what AMZ cost us per month and we weren't hitting it that hard. 6mo worth of Amazon spend was our capital investment and we got an easy 2x improvement in speed and massive improvement in elapsed time consistency. For base-load, EC2 pricing will kill you. If you have a truly massive set of jobs that can run for a few hours/days and then get torn down, then AWS is well worthwhile. VERY few people have such workloads and furthermore have the scripts to build/destroy their environment to take advantage of the unique capability.

[Nate Amsden]

Re: Amazon is NOT cheaper than self-run CO-LO

absolutely agree mr IOPS.

I tell folks amazon has one use case and one use case only

- your software stack can handle built to fail

- your application load is very highly variable, to the point where stuff is going up and coming down all the time.

I'd wager a TINY fraction of 1% of workloads out there are like that.

Anything else and your using it for the wrong reasons. That doesn't mean you can't limp along and get it to work. More often than not ends up with massive cost overruns, availability problems, performance problems or a combination of the them.

I've talked to bunches of companies over the past 2-3 years that have moved out of various clouds (often amazon) all of them for the same reasons that everyone lists. Unfortunately for folks like myself those often don't make the news headlines. I moved my company out of amazon cloud two years ago (I was hired to do just that I wouldn't of taken another job working with amazon, and still won't) and cost savings aside, the improved availability, performance, flexibility, and perhaps most important of all EASE OF USE has made everyone across the board more productive.

By contrast I tell folks it's like building a Hadoop cluster backed by a tier 1 Fibre channel SAN for storage. Sort of.

It's the wrong solution for the problem at hand. Though ironically the FC SAN will do the hadoop job better than amazon cloud can do just about everything else. You'll just pay a lot for it.

[disk iops]

Re: Amazon is NOT cheaper than self-run CO-LO

<quote> Though ironically the FC SAN will do the hadoop job better than amazon cloud can do just about everything else. </quote>

You can save mucho money if you buy an EMC CX3-80 or otherwise expired products that you can still get next-business-day parts delivery of any number of outfits. Admittedly Hadoop is still better served by keeping disks local (10K rpm can be a real benefit) but I've done it.

[spiny norman]

But where is AWS?

In Amazon's SEC filings there's a note to the Other revenue category, which says all AWS revenue is reported in N. America, there's no AWS in the much smaller International component. Did you take that into account in your estimates?

[Anonymous Coward]

How's that PROFIT going Amazon?