WWAD: What Will Amazon Do?
December 4, 2019
Silicon Angle published “Commentary: Andy Jassy Aims to Reinvent Amazon Web Services for the Cloud’s Next Generation.” The story carries the subtitle “In an exclusive one-on-one conversation, Amazon’s cloud chief reveals how he views the future of the cloud, the competition, market shifts, customer demands and controversies.”
Several statements in the write up warranted an orange highlight:
- It’s time to embrace the next cloud wave or get crushed by it.
- The cloud has completely “flipped the business and startup model on its head.”
- “Enterprises realize that if they want to be successful, sustainable companies over time, they can’t just make small, incremental changes,” he said.
- The “vast majority” of organizations pursuing a multicloud strategy tend to pick a predominant provider and then, if they feel like they want another one, either because there’s a group that really is passionate about them or they want to know they can use a second cloud provider in case they fall out of sorts with the initial cloud provider, they will. Jassy went on to say that for customers implementing multiple clouds the workloads are split between a primary and secondary cloud more like 70/30 or 80/20 or 90/10, not 50/50.
- “Companies are going to want to eliminate network hops and find a way to have the compute and the storage much more local to the 5G network edge.”
- Next year roughly 82% of all new workloads will run Linux.
Net net: Crushing is part of the game plan. The interview is a component of the AWS re:Invent PR push. Prime stuff, not Grade A, but okay for consumption by Amazon shoppers.
Stephen E Arnold, December 4, 2019
AWS: A Semi Critical Look
December 3, 2019
DarkCyber found “Unbundling AWS” interesting. We decided to label the write up as semi critical. We will reveal the reasons at the foot of this post.
The write up explains one reason why AWS has become one of the leaders in cloud service. (Yes, we are hedging our bets because it is not clear how the cloud vendors in China are keeping score for their “growth.”)
The article includes this chart. Its story is clear. AWS is growing. The article highlights some important attributes of Amazon. First, there’s the old saw about AWS being a juggernaut, a word I like better than flywheel. Second, there’s this observation:
Getting a new software product to market has never been as cheap or fast as it is today, despite the fact that the surface area of in-depth knowledge required to build high-performing software has never been higher.
DarkCyber thinks this is a very, very important facet of Amazon’s approach. Why? You will have to wait until my chapter in a forthcoming book becomes available or attend my lecture in Washington, DC, on December 11, 2019, at the DG Vision conference.
Third, the article includes this important observation, often overlooked by retail crazed MBAs:
The availability of open source tooling and the ease of access to infrastructure on AWS and other IaaS providers, and infrastructure turning into software, which means it’s programmable and, increasingly, thinly-sliced.
Big implications ahead, gentle reader.
But what DarkCyber found particularly rewarding was the overt statement that entrepreneurs will just use AWS. We noted this bulleted list:
- “Frameworks and deployment tools that make application software agnostic to the underlying infrastructure provider. Things like the Serverless framework, containers + orchestration, or IAC tools like Saltstack, Terraform, Ansible, etc
- The overlapping areas of logging, APM, and monitoring. This is a hot area right now, with IPO’s like Dynatrace or Datadog, or acquisitions like SignalFX. Related: Cloudwatch is terrible!
- Data science workflows – this is my subjective, anecdotal experience, but most data scientists I know have a preference for Google Cloud for a lot of their work, and custom hardware like TPUs likely play a role here
- Authentication and identity – Auth0, LoginRadius, Okta, etc … where it may make sense to have a third-party handle
- Paradigms that lead to different stack choices – I’m a big proponent of the JAMstack, and it’s a prime example of a paradigm where AWS may not be a natural choice for parts of this architecture. I believe that we will continue to see this and other new architectural paradigms evolve.”
We think the write up gets one thing off center; specifically:
we should all be so lucky to be at a scale and level of popularity where this becomes a problem. It’s hard for me to see a lot of cases where AWS will be competing with companies before they reach scale.
We think AWS will compete with its entrepreneurs and big buck customers. Amazon Essentials makes that clear.
Stephen E Arnold, December 3, 2019
Amazon Alexa: What Happened? Who Knew?
November 26, 2019
I read a somewhat disingenuous tale of Amazon’s Alexa. Navigate to “We Never Anticipated Alexa to Have Such a Profound Impact on Society” and make your own determination. Note: You will need to disable your ad blocker to view this article from Hindu Business Line. Lucky you! Extra work. Surprises abound.
The main idea in the story is that Amazon created Alexa. Everything that took place was a bit of a shock. That includes, I suppose, the surveillance potential, the data stream value, and the willingness of people to put Jeff Bezos’ ear in their homes and offices. Yep, a surprise. Wow.
The write up includes a statement or two from an Amazonian, who remains surprised; for instance:
We have onboarded a lot of such training data. Hindi seemed like the next logical step. We’ll keep pushing the envelope. What has really caught our attention in India is the fact that Alexa and Echo devices are used by a lot of schools to teach kids English, general knowledge and other subjects. This is really inspiring and we will try bringing services and skills to enhance this process. We never anticipated this device which started off as a fancy geeky Star Trek-inspired tool to have such a profound impact on the society. Today, we are trying to make it more useful to students, teachers, people with vision challenges and so on.
Ah, surprise.
Stephen E Arnold, November 26, 2019
Google Cloud: Identification of an AWS Weakness
November 25, 2019
Who knows if this report is public relations or data gold? Today one can struggle to wriggle the truth in technical reports. If you are up to a challenge, navigate to “Just Eat Orders Google Cloud Platform for Its Data Needs – Ditches AWS.”
JustEat says on its Web site:
More than 12 million hungry people come to Just Eat every month. And they keep coming back because we continue to invest in marketing and improved products and services for customers and restaurants.
The write up points out that JustEat has 27 million customers. Each is “wanting food and you’ve got 112,000 restaurants. How do you start to map the two together?”
The article explains that the Google Cloud Platform is the solution. The company’s AWS system:
and every Monday morning, analysts and data scientists would cause a massive traffic jam and demand to get data, and the average query time would be 800 seconds, so people would start a query, go and get a coffee and then come back and get their results set and then may even have to query again if there’s something wrong.
How much faster is the Google solution? The answer is:
the average query time is down to 30 seconds, so not only are people getting data quicker than before, but all of that 90% of data that we weren’t ingesting is also being ingested – so the data estate is a magnitude bigger, and yet we’re still getting lower query times.
Just Eat was impressed with Google Contact Centre AI product. The write up quotes a JustEat executive as saying:
The post-order space is just as important [as ordering food], and I think there is a lot of work we can do there to improve the experience and remove anxiety. So, looking for services like Customer Contact Centre AI is a big piece.
A few observations:
- Amazon has invented a streaming data service. This article takes direct aim at AWS and its failures
- Query time improvement is interesting, but there is scant data about what’s happening within the GCP set up
- Amazon offers a range of smart software. The write up makes it clear that Google is just better at implementing.
Whom does one believe? The information flowing from Amazon via its AWS Web site or information in an article which can find little fault with the Google.
DarkCyber’s take away is that the PR battle between Google and AWS may be ticking up a notch. Despite the assertions in the write up, Amazon is likely to find a way to point out its virtues.
And the facts? Have you ever heard of road kill on the information superhighway?
Stephen E Arnold, November 25, 2019
AWS: Working Like a Mainframe? Maybe
November 22, 2019
Is it possible to mainframe-ize AWS? Batch operations and similar useful method? If you think the answer is, “No,” you may want to read “How NextRoll Leverages AWS Batch for Daily Business Operations.” The DarkCyber team has been laboring in the AWS data marketplace, and we were delighted to read this post in NextRoll.
We noted this passage:
The freedom of stack is one of them. As long as you can package your requirements into a Dockerfile, and build that docker image, you can deploy it to Batch. This enables us to use a wide variety of technologies in our stack. We have jobs that are written using C/C++, Python, Rust, GoLang, Haskell, Java and other programming languages. Freedom in the way that data is being processed is another reason.
The write up invokes the open source goodness some associate with AWS.
Net net: AWS delivers some useful functions. Mainframers may disagree, but batch is batch.
Stephen E Arnold, November 22, 2019
Amazon Rolls Out an Online Data Market
November 21, 2019
Here is some interesting news from Amazon Web Services. Inside Big Data reports, “Introducing AWS Data Exchange.” Third-party data has become integral to the processes of research, analytics, and machine-learning models for businesses and academic institutions, but the process of tapping into that data has been cumbersome and time-consuming. Organizations have had to establish and manage relationships with disparate data providers, and those providers have had to invest fortunes in marketing and technology to reach and serve customers. The AWS Data Exchange brings all these processes together on Amazon’s cloud platform. This will bring welcome simplicity to data providers and consumers alike while positioning AWS as an indispensable resource.
Oracle has a data marketplace too.
Through the AWS Marketplace, customers will be able to subscribe to popular data providers including Reuters (news data), Change Healthcare (healthcare transactions and claims), Dun & Bradstreet (global business records), Foursquare (location data), TruFactor (anonymized consumer data), and Pitney Bowes (demographics). Clearly, these data vendors represent a diverse assortment of data types to meet a wide range of needs. The API also integrates into certain third-party analytics platforms, like Databricks and Deloitte’s ConvergeHEALTH Miner. See the write-up for more on each of these resources. We also learn:
“Prior to subscribing to a data product, customers can review the price and terms of use that providers make publicly available. Once subscribed, customers can use the AWS Data Exchange API or console to ingest data they subscribe to directly into Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to use across the broadest and deepest portfolio of cloud services in AWS. Each time a provider publishes a new revision of their data, AWS Data Exchange notifies all subscribers via an Amazon CloudWatch Event, allowing them to automatically consume new revisions in their data lakes, applications, analytics, and machine-learning models running on AWS. Data subscription costs are consolidated in customers’ existing AWS invoice. Additionally, customers can ask their data providers to deliver their existing subscriptions to them using AWS Data Exchange at no cost. This enables customers to use AWS Data Exchange to consume all their third-party data in the AWS cloud using a single API. AWS Data Exchange also makes it easy for qualified data providers to securely package, license, and deliver data products to millions of AWS customers worldwide. AWS knows that customers care deeply about privacy and data security. AWS Data Exchange prohibits sharing sensitive personal data (e.g. personal health information) as well as any personal data that is not already lawfully and publicly available.”
The exchange also lets data providers publish their data on their terms, including private offers and custom terms for certain customers. They have the ability to review use cases and manage compliance needs, and will receive daily, weekly, and monthly reports on subscription activity. Perhaps most welcome to some, AWS will manage billing, collection, and secure data delivery. This development will make a big difference for many organizations; Amazon must be pretty pleased with itself.
Cynthia Murrell, November 21, 2019
DarkCyber for November 19, 2019, Now Available
November 19, 2019
The November 19, 2019, DarkCyber discussed Amazon’s patent US 10,296,764 B1 “Verifiable Cryptographically Secured Ledgers for Human Resource Systems.” Stephen tries his best to make this patent discussion thrilling. Well, perhaps “thrilling” may be stretching the discussion of the system and method disclosed in this 24 page disclosure. But there are some graphics and a number of statements which are probably too simple to satisfy a patent attorney. Nevertheless, if you are curious about Amazon and its invention for human resources, navigate to www.vimeo.com/373810982 and check out the program. This week’s program marks the start of “season two” of DarkCyber. More patents, an interview, and news stories will feature in the coming weeks. After celebrating three quarters of a century of semi-coherent thinking, DarkCyber will appear every two weeks. The interfaces implemented in the software Stephen uses slows him down. The team just tells him, “Okay, Boomer, work harder.” His response cannot be printed in this prestigious blog.
PS. In August, Stephen was quoted by the New York Times, in October by MIT’s Technology Review (yep, the Epstein friendly organization), and this month by Le Monde (that’s in Paris and in French no less). The subjects? Intelligence, Amazon, and the lack of awareness among certain residents of Harrod’s Creek to Stephen’s research. Hey, he lives in Kentucky which holds a proud place in the lower quartile of literacy in the US.
Kenny Toth, November 19, 2019
Amazon Product Search: A Challenge for the GOOG
November 18, 2019
Amazon is gaining ground in the search-based advertising arena. ZDNet reports, “Amazon Search Ad Business to Whittle Away at Google Market Share Through 2021, Says eMarketer.” Citing a recent eMarketer report, writer Larry Dignan tells us that, though Google will remain top dog by a wide margin for the foreseeable future, Amazon is positioned to increase its share. He writes:
“The report finds that Google will continue to dominate search advertising, but its share will fall over time. Amazon is expected to show search ad revenue growth of 29.5% in 2019, 30.7% in 2020 and 26.2% in 2021. Amazon’s advertising business has surged past Microsoft to be No. 2 behind Google, which has 73.1% of the search ad market. Amazon will end 2019 with 12.9%, followed by Microsoft at 6.5%. Verizon Media and Yelp round out the top five with market share of about 2%.In addition, Amazon’s advertising business is closely watched among Wall Street analysts. The search ad business falls into Amazon’s ‘other’ revenue category and many analysts expect it to be a break out business like Amazon Web Services. Google’s market share in the search advertising market is expected to drop to 70.5% by 2021, according to eMarketer estimates.”
Amazon, you see, has a unique advantage—many active shoppers begin their product searches there, so they are already poised to make a purchase. Dignan adds that other retail sites like Wal-Mart, Target, and eBay are also nipping at Google’s search-ad market share.
Cynthia Murrell, November 18, 2019
How to Create Solutions in Software: The Cloud and More
November 8, 2019
DarkCyber is working on a white paper. This white paper is about Amazon AWS and its products/services for LE and intel professionals. Don’t worry, the white paper will be free to those affiliated with an enforcement organization.
In that white paper, DarkCyber’s team includes a diagram with layers. One of the reviewers of the paper told a team member:
Layers. What’s AWS? A birthday cake?
We talked about our diagram and the notion of layers. One person talked about “Layers in Software: From Data to Value.” The article included this diagram, which is different from the illustration in the DarkCyber white paper, but it conveys the same message. Here’s the Jessitron image:
The main idea is explained this way:
Feature teams need to do everything, from the old perspective. But that’s too hard for one team — so we make it easier.
This is where Developer Experience (DevEx) teams come in. (a.k.a. Developer Productivity, Platform and Tools, or inaccurately DevOps Teams.) These undergird the feature teams, making their work smoother. Self-service infrastructure, smooth setup of visibility and control for production software. Tools and expertise to help developers learn and do everything necessary to fulfill each team’s purpose. Internal services are supported by external services. Managed services like Kubernetes, databases, queueing, observability, logging: we have outsourced the deep expertise of operating these components. Meanwhile, internal service teams like DevEx have enough understanding of the details, plus enough company-specific context, to mediate between what the outside world provides and what feature teams need. This makes development smoother, and therefore faster and safer. We once layered by serving data to software. Now we layer by serving value to people.
This is a useful explanation. It applies to Amazon’s approach to the LE and intel sector. There is a twist in the Amazon digital river of products and services. That’s to be expected.
What is that twist?
The white paper will be out one the reviewers complete their inputs.
Stephen E Arnold, November 8, 2019
The UAE and AI: What Will Students Learn?
November 7, 2019
DarkCyber noted “Abu Dhabi AI University Is Key to UAE’s Future As the Oil Dries Up.” The write up states:
The Gulf state is developing healthcare, financial services, renewable energy and materials technology sectors, which will make up the UAE economy when the oil runs out. But first, it needs to ensure its citizens have the skills to drive them. The long-term nature of the UAE government’s initiative is what stands out for Oxford University professor Michael Brady, who is interim president of Abu Dhabi’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), which was set up to ensure the UAE has the right skills to drive these industries. The Masdar City-based university has just opened to applications for its first intake of 50 students.
Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, among others, have a presence in UAE. The article quoted Professor Brady as saying:
But it was the ambition that he saw when he visited Abu Dhabi, which puts UK government planning to shame, that cemented his interest “There is a stark difference between the short-termism that characterizes so much of government policy in the UK, where politicians worry about the headlines tomorrow morning,” he said. “It is so refreshing to be part of a government-led initiative that has a 30-year vision to transform the economy and the culture.”
The AI university is important. The question the write up did not address is:
What cloud AI service will be the core of the curriculum?
It seems obvious that the go-to cloud system for students will have an advantage in deploying next-generation solutions.
Worth monitoring which of these three cloud aspirants will capture the hearts and minds of the student, UAE officials, and investors who want to cash in on this investment in the future.
Stephen E Arnold, November 7, 2019
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