back to article Oh dear, AWS. Cloud growth slowing as customers get a dose of cost reality

Research from tech services membership and standards body The Uptime Institute is showing slowing growth in the major cloud providers, suggesting that the era of hyper-expansion is drawing to a close. In a report published this week, the institute said that AWS reported a quarter-on-quarter revenue increase of 27.5 percent for …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    AWS is the home of Hackers

    I run a small website and in the past few months, the site has had numerous hack attempts (almost a DDOS but not quite) all from IPs 'owned' by AWS.

    There are even sites on EC-2 that do nothing more than slurp every page on your site. Amazon is just not interested in stopping them after all, it could affect their revenue stream.

    I have filed numerous abuse reports and TBH, some have been fobbed off by AWS.

    As a result, I have just blocked ALL of the AWS IP addresses on my firewall.

    Amazon in its entirety can go take a hike over the nearest 1000ft cliff.

    1. Plest Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Re: AWS is the home of Hackers

      Just trawl github or pastebin for a short while, won't take long to find some AWS creds on a big fat account, spin up some EC2s for a a few hours on someone else's dime and the scum use it beat the crap out of some poor sod's website using huge fat pipes AWS has to offer.

    2. Peter-Waterman1

      Re: AWS is the home of Hackers

      I dont think hackers would positively affect AWS revenue stream. I think many "hackers" will use stolen credit cards to sign up for accounts and abuse AWS until they get shut down and do it again. I imagine hackers are costing AWS a LOT of cash, not the other way around

      1. JohnSheeran
        Trollface

        Re: AWS is the home of Hackers

        It's hilarious that you think they don't get that cost back through all of their customers.

        1. Peter-Waterman1

          Re: AWS is the home of Hackers

          What's easier, going to the dark web, paying 1$ for 500 stolen credit card details creating AWS accounts with the cards, bitcoin mining for a month before being shut down, or hacking 500 AWS customers to achieve the same thing? Baring in mind that most people have 2FA enabled

          1. JohnSheeran

            Re: AWS is the home of Hackers

            I don't think you understood what I meant by that response. AWS isn't going to suffer any lost money or any increased cost that they can't mitigate by charging their customers more. Until the world sobers up from the current state of cloud drunken-ness, AWS and other cloud providers will continue to let the bad behavior run rampant.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: AWS is the home of Hackers

      I did the same thing a while back.

    4. Code For Broke

      Re: AWS is the home of Hackers

      DV because: Since about 1974, Internet was intended for slurping.

  2. Plest Silver badge
    Facepalm

    So basically what most sane techies saw about 5 years ago, that sooner of later the novelty of the cloudy future would wear off. Sure were a lot of PHBs who bought into the "cloudyt utopia" without thinking about the beating they'd get sooner or later from the reality bat!

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Like the laws of physics, some things can't be changed and cloud will always be more expensive because of the overprovisioning required to provide that notional "on-demand" capacity: you always pay for what you provision.

  3. Chunky Lafunga

    Quelle Surprise

    Anyone with any sense could see this happening but the people with sense don't make the decisions. You just get senior muppets who have just come back from some seminar/conference jolly asking "why are we not in the cloud yet? All the other muppets I talked to said they have done it."

    Of course future conversations of "how could we have been so wrong" won't happen at similar events as that admits failure.

    1. Mr.Nobody

      Re: Quelle Surprise

      Ten years ago the CEO/owner kept telling our VP of operations that we had to be in the cloud, even though we have nothing but saas applications we offer to customers (we were cloud before it was cloud).

      We were marched to create a non-functional DR solution in the cloud that has cost (which everyone in the know said wouldn't work and would cost more) 5x what the on prem functional solution costs in other continents.

      CEO/owner and VP are all gone. We are still paying for a non-functioning solution because?

      1. cschneid

        Re: Quelle Surprise

        > We are still paying for a non-functioning solution because?

        Institutional inertia. In physics, it's called "the irresistible force."

      2. Someone Else Silver badge

        Re: Quelle Surprise

        There is no such thing as too much stupid.

    2. Code For Broke

      Re: Quelle Surprise

      Heh... "Muppets"...

      (+)(+)

      / \

      \ -==- /

      \ /

      <\/\/\/>

      / \

  4. hoola Silver badge

    Maturing Market?

    Perhaps we are reaching the point were all the easy wins and quick sales have ended. The easy stuff is now in the cloud, those remaining either don't want to lose control of their systems, cannot afford the shift or have looked at what has happened and made the decision, "no thanks".

    Quite how 35 percent growth in the three months to September 2022 can be disappointing just goes to show how bent the entire market is.

    1. chivo243 Silver badge

      Re: Maturing Market?

      ^^^. I thought the same thing, market saturation... There are enough cloud providers, and those customers who wanted it, have it already. I wouldn't be surprised to see these 30+% growth figures dip significantly in the coming years.

      Will it be the mongrels fighting for the scraps?

      1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

        Re: Maturing Market?

        Just wait till they discover the costs of moving and getting their data out. Buyer's remorse won't begin to cover it!

    2. Claptrap314 Silver badge

      Re: Maturing Market?

      Years of 30-40% growth needs must come to an end. However, if it is followed by a couple of years of 20-30% growth, that's just market saturation kicking in.

      Another stellar no-news article here at ElReg...

    3. martinusher Silver badge

      Re: Maturing Market?

      >Quite how 35 percent growth in the three months to September 2022 can be disappointing

      There's an Excel spreadsheet function which does extrapolation for you. Its much loved by marketing types who don't read the fine print disclaimer -- "May not be representative of real life".

      Spreadsheets are powerful tools but in the hands of Marketing type people they're deadly.

    4. Donuts

      Re: Maturing Market?

      Perhaps the yacht bonus target was 36%?

  5. 3arn0wl

    Clouded vision

    I realise that I hold minority opinions, but doing stuff remotely on other people's silicon has always seemed a dotty idea to me - making things overly complicated, and adding risk, for not much return as far as I could see. Perhaps others are coming round to the same opinion...? One can only hope.

    I hope the UK government wises up. (Not holding my breath)

  6. Michael Hoffmann Silver badge

    Gartner

    I'm really not a fan of Gartner, quite the contrary, but they did create this graph that perfectly describes the reality of hype

    https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3887767

    Nobody should be surprised that we're heading into or are smack-dab in the Trough of Disillusionment.

  7. NeilPost Silver badge

    Numbers Game

    No real mention of the self-evident fact that the bigger you get the harder it becomes to maintain even a linear %tge growth.

    10% of £€$100bn in revenue is far larger than 10% of £€$50bn.

    It’s simple maths (note the s).

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    AWS is not a 'new' company any more yet they are still growing 30+% year on year after 15+ years. That's impressive in anyone's books. And making a profit! Pure Storage, one of the 'best' storage vendors, just grew 30% year on year too but most of the other infra companies are growing single digit. The 'slowdown' to 30% feels like the natural order of things when you're nearly a 100Bn company.

  9. captain veg Silver badge

    genius

    The genius of the The Cloud business model is that they make it cheap to go in and easy to upgrade. Before you know it you're spending the equivalent of your old on-prem capital budget for the next three years every month.

    With capital expenditure someone has to really think about the requirements, make a plan, cost it and get agreement from finance.

    Cloud rental payments are operational expenditure. Hardly any planning or oversight required or executed. It just keeps getting bigger. Now we know by how much.

    -A.

  10. dboyes

    Haul out the 1972 issues of Datamation...

    Service bureau v2. Been there, done that, got the bill.

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