LeonD

Thanks for the feedback. I've updated the template to include the source.

> The single cited study was done by FireEye, which sells security products and services. They have an incentive to exaggerate the problem, since their business depends on the existence of threats.

The widespread vulnerability of corporate networks is not something that FireEye discovered on its own, as the article notes. Besides, security threats don't seem to need too much exaggeration nowadays from a public awareness standpoint.

>The lack of reporting doesn't imply a lack of incidents. Since reporting breaches would result in negative publicity for both the cloud providers and their customers, we'd expect them to keep quiet.

Publicly traded companies legally can't hide a major breach from the SEC even if it hurts the bottom line. As a matter of fact, that's one of the main reasons why they are obliged to disclose such incidents in the first place. Target and Home Depot are some of the latest examples.

> it's mostly commodity hardware

It's commodity in the sense that Amazon buys it from commodity vendors, but they use custom designs built to address the specific parameters of their data centers. Very few other companies can afford to employ an army of engineers to tweak every last component for optimal price-performance, nor for that matter do they have the benefit of accounting for a noticeable share of a supplier's revenue when entering the negotiations room.

> Smaller companies can and do offer much better pricing, they just don't have the marketing budget to convince you of it.

I am aware of at least one player (DigitalOcean) offering lower pricing than AWS, but that's only in a fairly limited niche. So while they may have the "economies" part checked they don't have the scale and scope to compete with Amazon on a particularly substantial level. I'd also be curious how they match up to Amazon in terms of operational efficiency since they lack many of the the advantages I listed here and in my previous post, which give AWS an edge in the race to zero as time passes.

> And in Amazon Web Services, the biggest thing Amazon has to fear is the OpenStack initiative producing a platform that lots of little hosts can host.

I highly doubt OpenStack alone can make it possible for smaller players to replicate AWS's economics of scale, or even come particularly close. From what I understand Amazon doesn't just plop their software on commodity hardware, they use highly specialized gear optimized for running specific services. And that's not to mention buying power, the ability to run on razor-thin margins and other business factors that impact pricing.

Is a relational workload that requires four-nines-plus availability like Amazon is touting really something an organization would be willing to run in the cloud? Especially since that category includes a lot of personally identifiable data that legally can't be trusted to a third party. Wonder what kind of use cases they're aiming for.

That is already happening to an extent, except the wares being promoted are the ads themselves and they're being sold in sub-second auctions where the bidders are different algorithms operating on behalf of various companies.