AWS’s slowing growth is all over the news. Here are two different views of what is causing the slowing growth.
The NYtimes’s Quentin Hardy says the problem is AWS needs a bigger sales team for the business market.
What Amazon’s service does have is a great roster of named clients, and probably lots more companies that aren’t ready to admit somebody else runs their computers. It has an enormous cloud and a technical understanding of global-scale computing that is second to none. All it needs is a bigger sales team for businesses and a way to get its checks signed faster.
Zynga and Sony moved out of AWS years ago.
Lessons from Zynga & Sony on moving from Amazon AWS
Earlier this month Zynga announced its move from Amazon AWS to its own private Z-Cloud. Sony also started to move increasing parts of its workload from Amazon to Rackspace OpenStack.
There isn't so much in common between these different use cases, except for the fact that they may indicate the beginning of a trend (I’ll get back to that toward the end) where companies start to take more control over their cloud infrastructure.
So what really brought Zynga and Sony to make such a move?
MOZ dumped AWS.
Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and ‘Lacking’ Service
[Updated, 1/31/14, 12:01 pm] Seattle marketing technology company Moz had a worse-than-expected 2013 in terms of profitability and products. But what really jumped out at me in the privately held company’s startlingly frank review of the year was new CEO Sarah Bird’s blunt criticism of Amazon Web Services (AWS), which she says the company is leaving for reasons of cost, product stability, and service.
Gigaom’s Barb Darrow says the AWS problem is companies are leaving AWS, prices are dropping, and competition is intense.
First let’s start with the facts.
AWS sales dipped this quarter. Amazon announced Thursday that for its second quarter, which ended June 30, the category that includes AWS saw a 3 percent sequential revenue slip. That “other” category — which also includes advertising services and co-branded credit card agreements — also logged 38 percent growth year over year. That sounds great until you realize year-over-year growth in the first quarter was 60 percent. There have been other slight quarterly dips in the category’s otherwise relentless rise over the past few years, but they’ve mostly happened between fourth and first quarters.
The news is starting to leak that another company has joined the move out of AWS.
However, a source familiar with Dropbox’s current strategy said the company lately has been moving more of its IT infrastructure away from AWS and onto its own turf. There are now 10,000 servers in Dropbox facilities running loads that had been on Amazon EC2, although it’s not clear what percentage of Dropbox’s computing requirements that represents. Dropbox is currently storing data both in its own data centers and on Amazon S3 until the end of the year, this source said.
In closing Barb thinks AWS’s future has more pressure.
So as rival public cloud powers add services and cut prices, and as more customers see the benefits of hybrid as opposed to pure public cloud computing, expect the pressure on AWS to ratchet up.
AWS is in an out war with for the cloud with Google, Microsoft, and many others.
With this news of Dropbox moving out I would not want to be an internal AWS employee. Jeff Bezos has got to be livid. When internal PR shows the NYTimes saying all we need is more sales people I doubt that would calm the troops.