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Comment by dholowiski | Hacker News Reader

I had heard of all of those except for HPC - which I'd probably never use anyway. But I bet if you showed this list to a 'normal' person they'd be shocked to discover that Amazon does more than sell books. As we found out last week, Amazon is really becoming an 'essential service' for the internet, much like electricity. If you want to do a fun thought experiment, think about what would happen if Amazon went bankrupt and shut everything down tomorrow, with no notice (unlikely but it could happen)...

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Amazon Marketplace sellers would be upset, and EBS/S3 users who didn't back up data outside the cloud would have some work ahead of them. Aside from that, it wouldn't be doomsday for very many people. Amazon's not really an exclusive provider of anything they do. Consumers will buy from another store, AWS users will spin up VPS instances somewhere else, CDN users can go back to Akamai, Payments users will swap the button for PayPal or Google Checkout instead, etc.

If by "upset" you mean "out of business." There are hundreds(?) of multi-million-dollar businesses who do the vast majority of their volume as a seller on the Amazon Marketplace.

On second thought, I guess there would be a short term huge increase of sales on eBay, where most Amazon sellers also sell, so I guess "out of business" is hyperbole.

By that definition, it seems like no services are critical online, as there is always some alternative. The reality is that doing all the changes you mentioned could literally cost some companies many months or even years of time.

I find that unlikely. AWS hasn't been a major provider for that long. They weren't PCIDSS certified until just 5 months ago, so no big companies were even doing ecommerce independently on their platform yet.

If it took a year to build your service on AWS products, it shouldn't take years to do it again with another provider now that you've done it before. A server is a server, whatever you've programmed to run on those virtual servers will run on identical virtual servers at another company. It's only the parts of your system that interact with Amazon's APIs, and your human systems/policies, that have to be reworked.

And if you're big enough that your systems take years to build, you have a disaster plan already. If Amazon blinked out of existence tomorrow, Netflix wouldn't be standing there with no idea what they'd do to get back online.

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