The Rapid Growth of AWS
May 14, 2019
The business of cloud hosting continues to heat up, we learn from The Register’s article, “Big Cloud Gets Bigger: AWS’s Growth Alone in 2018 Matched Google’s Total Haul—But Bezos Beast Is Still on the Hunt.” Writer Paul Kunert cites Canalys as he reports that AWS received $2.3 billion in infrastructure services alone in 2018, the same amount Google made overall that year. That is a 41% increase, to $7.6 billion. He writes:
“However, the first section of the battle has only just begun. The fight for enterprise customers’ wallets will intensify in 2019 as those companies try to maintain aggressive expansion by extending their cloud business into physical environment, shipping hardware to clients’ data centers. ‘The cloud infrastructure market is moving into a new phase of hybrid IT adoption, with businesses demanding cloud services that can be more easily integrated with their on-premises environment,’ said Canalys chief analyst Alastair Edwards. ‘Most cloud providers are now looking at ways to enter customers’ existing data centers, either through their own products or via partnerships,’ he added.
Kunert gives us a peek at where each major player in the cloud stands, noting that Microsoft got the jump with its launch of Azure Stack in 2017. He points out the recent release of Google’s multi-cloud rig Anthos. We’re also told that China’s huge population boosted that country’s Alibaba into fourth place, over IBM. Though the gap remains wide between AWS and these competitors, Amazon just might be able to catch up.
Cynthia Murrell, May 14, 2019
Amazonia for May 13, 2019
May 13, 2019
Amazon had an interesting week. Not many companies have a senior manager who wants humans on the moon. DarkCyber wonders if Amazon’s one day delivery will work for these civilization savers. We found a number of Amazon items interesting in the last week.
Killer Pencils? Yes, and Other School Supplies Too
The attorney general in the great State of Washington and proud possessor of the not so great city of Seattle is going to save lives. “Amazon Must Remove Toxic School Supplies, Kid’s Jewelry from Marketplace Nationwide” revealed that:
at least 15,188 purchases of products with illegal levels of lead and cadmium from Amazon.com.
How did these “deadly” products find their way into Amazon’s inventory? DarkCyber assumes that Amazon assumed that its vendors were not selling products that could harm a child or other buyer. DarkCyber further assumes that the vendors assumed their suppliers were not mixing lead and other interesting compounds into their manufacturing process. Yep, that’s a lot of assumes.
The attorney general wants this to change:
Any future sellers must provide this certification before listing their products for sale. Moreover, if the Attorney General or Washington Department of Ecology advise Amazon of any children’s school supplies or jewelry that exceed safe levels, Amazon must remove the product from its online marketplace within two business days.
Yes, would an MBA describe these pencils and book covers as killer products? DarkCyber is not sure.
Amazon: Another HR Flap
If you are interested in how high-technology companies manage their organizations, you may find “Three Muslim Amazon Workers Allege They Were Unfairly Punished for Raising Workplace Discrimination Concerns.” DarkCyber has no way of knowing if the report is accurate. Read the cited article and decide for yourself.
On a related note, the HR aware may want to note that Amazon advertising has triggered a problem which could spill over into company meetings. CNBC reported in “Amazon Mistakenly Told Some Sellers That It’s Now Blocking Ads with Religious Content” and is now saying, “We did not change anything.” Just a item to file away in case further management issues arise.
Amazon’s Security Gap
DarkCyber learned from Bloomberg, a real news outfit, that Amazon was “hit by extensive fraud with hackers siphoning merchant funds.” Hackers compromised about 100 accounts (a number which strikes DarkCyber as a modest one) as “unidentified hackers were able to siphon funds from merchant accounts over six months last year [2018].” Bloomberg is quite forgiving, offering this comment:
The case highlights how the world’s biggest online retail platform — designed to be automated with minimal human input — can be misused and how difficult it is for Amazon to find perpetrators.
DarkCyber believes that increased risk and vulnerability are baked into the online systems. Remedies are reactive. Amazon is in the policeware business and cannot protect itself from fraud. How will Amazon secure Alexa data? What about the information flowing into Amazon from its more than 60,000 home device support operations?
Alexa, Can You Delete Recordings and Transcripts?
The answer to the question is, “No.” The popular home surveillance and convenience device has more than 80,000 “skills.” Protecting privacy may not be one of the ones which performs reliably. ZDNet reported that Amazon is working on a fix. Here’s the key passage from the write up:
Amid new complaints that parents can’t delete what their children say to Echo Dot Kids Edition, Amazon has admitted it doesn’t really give Alexa users the ability to truly delete what they say to Echo devices.
Privacy? Less important than one day delivery perhaps?
Convenience Stores: An Endangered Species
One consolation is that Amazon, so far, has not figured out how to sell gasoline to consumers. That’s on the radar of some. For now, the one-day delivery push may push the thin-margin outfits over the cliff and into a sea of red ink. “Amazon Prime’s One-Day Shipping Could Devastate Convenience and Drug Stores” explains that speedier shipping may make the local retailer obsolete.
Amazon and Meds
Amazon’s push into health care is not grabbing headlines this week. We did spot a story on CNBC titled “The Inside Story of Why Amazon Bought PillPack in Its Effort to Crack the $500 Billion Prescription Market.” After a weird business school case study introduction, the guts of the write up seems to be:
The value for Amazon is in the promise of plugging the delivery network into the giant e-commerce machine, especially when considering that the average PillPack user in 2018 was worth $5,000 in revenue, through insurance payments and patient co-pays…
With lots of Americans taking medicine, Amazon may see a low margin, growth business which snaps into its other infrastructure and convenience plays. Amazon generic drugs? Amazon “doc in the box” facilities? Amazon health insurance? Many possibilities, and these are not mentioned by CNBC. The personal details about eye glasses are okay, but there may be more to PillPack than pills.
Amazon can at this time reach 72 percent of people living in the lower 48 states at this time. Why go to the pharmacy already struggling to survive when you can go to your front door?
Amazon Is Gunning for the Google
BusinessInsider (registration and/or pay wall in place) snagged an Amazon PowerPoint deck. (DarkCyber understood that the great flywheel did not permit the use of slide decks.) The idea is that the eyeballs on Amazon’s devices and Web pages want and need ads. There’s even the NFL’s Thursday Night Football eyeballs. How remarkable is the presentation? Standard “look how many eyeballs we can deliver.” One interesting factoid is that Amazon sales people like to mention that 80 percent Fire TV owners have a premium Prime account. This means to the tense, sometimes insecure Madison Avenue types one thing — Buyers who purchase stuff. If you are a member of Microsoft LinkedIn, you can download an OTT slide deck at this link.
If you don’t know what OTT means, you can get a handy definition omitted from the BusinessInsider and the Zohar Urian post on LinkedIn. OTT is a reference to streaming media available when one owns a box like Roku or Amazon’s gizmos.
Amazon is able to:
- Provide tracking data
- Provide behavioral data
- Provide contextual data
- Identify “similar to” buyers
- Suggest where to put ads to sell older products
- Deliver slices and dices to make target oriented marketers happy.
The idea is that Amazon can “prove” ads work. Google, well, displaying ads next to children on park swing sets is a bit of an issue for some would be Google advertisers.
The Google has an Amazon problem with two pointy things welded to the front of the Bezos bulldozer. First, Amazon is sucking away product searches from the Google. Double digit product search declines, one disgruntled Web site operator smirked at lunch. This fellow added, “Good for Amazon.” The second problem is that buying an ad on a Google property may place the message for a wholesome product next to questionable content. YouTube does have quite a bit of interesting content, and some advertisers remain wary of the GOOG’s smart software and human editor filtering process.
Amazon: Bring Cash
How about those empty store fronts on Fifth Avenue? There will be more space available as Amazon’s brick-and-mortar push expands. “Amazon Go’s First NY Store Is Also the First to Accept Cash” reports:
what’s new at this [Amazon Go Store] location is actually something Amazon Go was invented to get rid off: a cash register.
The problem is, according to CNet:
While Amazon gained loads of attention for this reinvention of shopping, the nascent trend of cashless stores has already faced blowback from local and state governments. Cashless store operators, which include the salad chain Sweetgreen and restaurant Dig Inn, say going cashless made their checkout lines faster and most of their customers didn’t pay in cash anyways.
The tracking technology is still in place in Go Stores. So bring cash.
Amazon Advertises Itself (Just Like Leo LaPorte’s Twit.tv Network)
Vox reported that “Amazon wants to pay the New York Times and BuzzFeed to Expand So It Can Reach More Shoppers Outside the US.” DarkCyber learned that Amazon sees Amazon as equals for this type of promotion. Vox points out:
Amazon is specifically interested in publishers that have built up significant affiliate link units and would be paying them to build out those groups. That includes BuzzFeed, which has made e-commerce a significant part of its revenue strategy and has hired a team of writers to create shopping-friendly content; the Times, which bought the Wirecutter shopping guide for around $30 million in 2016; and New York Media, which has turned New York Magazine’s “Strategist” shopping section into a meaningful part of its online business mix.
Now how does Google’s quality measures deal with this type of overt, large scale search engine optimization approach to links and traffic? DarkCyber’s view is, “Not very well.” Perhaps the GOOG will have to filter Amazon links because the tactics could be considered those of black hat SEO operators. Filtering links will further erode Google’s product search traffic. Yep, this is an issue and one not addressed in the real news Vox write up.
How Amazon Terminates Old Fashioned AWS Services
Amazon sure seems to be nice. A good example is a blog post called “Amazon S3 Path Deprecation Plan – The Rest of the Story.” Unlike the Google, which just up and kills products and services, Amazon walks slowly toward the “terminate with extreme prejudice button.” Amazon wants to herd its customers toward the new and improved versions of Amazon’s technology; for example, getting rid of paths. How old school! The new approach involves object keys, which Jeff Bezos really likes. You will have the opportunity to experience this new approach yourself — whether you like it or not. That’s a Googley touch.
More Partners and Integrators
It is difficult to keep track of the companies joining the AWS bandwagon. Here are a few of the more interesting ones.
- Arcadia Data is an Advanced Amazon Partner. Source: MarketWatch
- Cherwell Software now delivers integrated cloud management services via Amazon Quick Start. Source: Yahoo
- CloudBees now allows AWS customers to deploy CloudBees on AWS. A CloudBee deployment is a cloud native, continuous delivery (CD) solution that can be hosted on-premise or in the cloud. It provides a shared, centrally managed, self-service experience for development teams. Source: Help Net Security
- CloudKnox is now an AWS Advanced Technology Partner. Source: Digital Journal
- CoreSite offers higher bandwidth for AWS Direct Connect. Source: MarketWatch
- Cypherium teams up with Amazon to offer blockchain as a service. See Businesswire’s story on Yahoo.
- Digital Reality provides AWS Direct Connect services. Source: Yahoo
- Digital Reasoning, once a gung ho IBM affiliate, has shifted gears with “Conduct Surveillance.” This appears to include the search and retrieval function plus lots of middleware. The company provides is solution via Amazon. Google gets some DR love too. Source: Virtual Strategy. (Every time I type “virtual strategy” I think, “Why bother with a real strategy when one can have a virtual strategy.” Source: Virtual Strategy
- eCloudValley is allegedly the world’s only AWS premier consulting partner with certifications for China and the rest of the world. Ah, yes, China, the land of surveillance. Source: Cision
- ExtraHop has joined Amazon’s AWS consulting program. Source: Digital Journal
- Getronics and HeleCloud team up to launch an Amazon Center of Excellence; that is, a consulting operation. Source: Virtual Strategy
- Intent Solutions is a partner and one recognized by Amazon itself. Source: PR.com
- Isaca (a global association helping individuals and enterprises achieve the positive potential of technology) has introduced an AWS Audit Program. Source: Security Info Watch
- The great state of Louisiana has partnered with Amazon for “AWS Educate.” More about an Amazon branded state appears in The Advocate.
- Mission, a managed services and consulting company for Amazon Web Services (AWS), has met the requirements of the AWS Managed Services Provider (MSP) Partner Program. Source: Global News Wire
- Nutanix now runs on AWS Xi clusters. Source: CRN
- SGX, a blockchain outfit, is moving its platform to AWS. Source: Finextra
- SmartShift has partnered with Amazon in order to move SAP to AWS. I know that SAP is an interesting outfit and its software can be particularly exciting to configure. But SmartShift will knock that S/4 Hana stuff out of the park. SAP is embracing the Bezos bulldozer. SAP evolved from a former IBM professionals desire to reinvent IBM. A Bakersfield.com report.
- Tantus Technologies is an AWS Select Consulting Partner. Source: Yahoo
- Ventech Solutions is now an Amazon Advanced Consulting Partner. Source: BusinessInsider. No registration required for a recycled news release unlike the recycled OTT article.
Moving Mainframe Code to AWS
Impossible you say. You are wrong, pilgrim. Navigate to the AWS success story of the week, “Automated Refactoroing of a US Department of Defense Mainframe to AWS.” The main point is that it took place and worked. The actual grunt work was handled not by the online bookstore or the wizards in the DoD’s numerous information technology departments. The outfit which pulled off most of the work was Array. When did this take place? In 2018, but it takes some time for certain examples to surface. You can read more about this migration in the AWS Partner Network Blog here.
Amazon Servers: Where in the World Are They, Jeff Bezos?
The Verge’s story “Mapping Out Amazon’s Invisible Server Empire” provides a link to the map that Amazon won’t provide. Well, the map is a link to a sketchy document available in WikiLeaks. The Wikileaks’ map is at this link. The Verge contributes this remarkable “real news” observation:
most of the AWS footprint consists of overseas hubs in colocation centers run by companies like Equinix or Securus.
Yeah, that’s tough to figure out.
Stephen E Arnold, May 13, 2019
Amazonia for May 6, 2019
May 6, 2019
Amazon has become a company to watch—at least in some advertising circles. We learned that an outfit named “The Marin Software” is holding a live webinar called “Amazon Advertising: A Crash Course for the Modern Marketer.” One must sign up for the program because there won’t be a version of the program on YouTube if the email promotion sent to select individuals is to be believed. In the webinar, one will learn in just 60 minutes how to set up an Amazon ad campaign, the “best practices” for creating successful Amazon ads, and “advanced strategies” which will generate higher revenue. How does one find out about the webinar? Easy. Just chase down Marin at this url. DarkCyber believes that Google ad chiefs will attend.
In other Amazon news this week, DarkCyber noted:
Amazon Is Ethical
Computerworld reports that “AWS is ethical about AI.” The source is an Amazon executive who reveals:
But ‘we just don’t talk about it.
The story points out:
AWS offers some best practice advice relating to its customers’ use of data, but has stopped short of laying out its own guiding principles. It is up to clients to decide whether their use of AWS tools is ethical, said the company’s head of solution architecture in ANZ, Dr Peter Stanski.
Dr. Stanski allegedly said:
“We certainly don’t want to do evil; everything we’ve released to customers to innovate [helps] to lift the bar on what’s actually happening in the industry. It’s really up to the individual organization how they use that tech.”
The exploding products item is not related to artificial intelligence and is, therefore, not part of smart software.
Amazon: Product Quality
Facebook has interesting content, and Amazon has products which may provide a buyer with a battery explosion. “When Your Amazon Purchase Explodes” provides some information about the quality control methods for some sellers’ products. Well, there’s not much. The article reveals:
Curious about what [a battery fire] had happened, Jones went back online to try to contact the seller and alert Amazon to the problem. Scrolling through reviews, he realized other buyers were reporting fires from the same item. But Amazon seemed unconcerned, he told me: Customer-service representatives treated his report like a new one each time he called, asking for his name, the order number, and the story of what had happened over and over again. Amazon would not put him in touch with the seller and never assumed blame for the fire.
The message seems to be, “We just sell stuff.” In the small town in which I was born, one auto dealer had a sidewalk guarantee for each used car sold. Here’s the idea: “Once you drive the car off my lot and across the sidewalk, it’s your problem.”
Amazon’s Revenue from Third Party Sellers
Geekwire reported that Amazon’s first-party online sales dipped below 50 percent of the company’s overall net sales in the first quarter, reflecting the growth of the tech giant’s other businesses. The write up said:
The milestone doesn’t take into account sales by other retailers on Amazon.com, but it’s nonetheless a testament to the tech giant’s growing diversification. It’s especially notable in light of the company’s history. Amazon rose to prominence as a pioneer of the e-commerce industry, becoming the online “Everything Store” by expanding beyond its original mission of selling books.
And what will the sellers’ need? Amazon advertising and ways to stand out from the rapidly increasing crowd? SEO.
The data, if accurate, underscore the threat Amazon shopping poses to eBay, Google, and Wal-Mart.
Amazon the Target of an Alleged Microsoft Fear Tactic
Business Insider, which is an interesting publication indeed, reports that Microsoft is capturing customers using IBM’s old school tactic: FUD or fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The story “Microsoft’s Satya Nadella Uses a Subtle Fear Tactic to Win Cloud Business Away from Amazon” asserts that the tactic is manifested in statements like this from Microsoft:
Do you trust a technology partner to store their data, handle their transactions, know the most intimate details of their business, if that tech partner is also a competitor?
Apparently Microsoft mentions that Amazon’s businesses are like “tentacles”, “pimples”, and “boils.” Nice stuff.
Business Insider concludes:
Amazon’s willingness to compete with its partners and customers could be AWS’s Achilles heel and one that Nadella seems ready to exploit.
Amazon: A Digital Souq
CNBC reported “Amazon Launches New Middle East Marketplace, and Rebrands Souq, the Company It Bought for $580 million in 2017.” Here’s the interesting bit:
The launch of the new Middle East marketplace, which was first reported by CNBC in January, comes at a time of slowing international sales for Amazon. In its most recent quarter, Amazon’s international sales only grew 9% from a year ago to $16.2 billion.
Contrast Amazon’s tactics with Google’s. Amazon seems to be moving in a purposeful way. Google appears to be more focused on staff-related issues and Amazon’s encroachment on product search and online advertising. For information about how Amazon’s ad business is changing the game for Google and other firms, check out “Google’s Competition for Advertising Heats Up from Amazon, Rival Platforms.”
Amazon: An Uber for Trucking
CNBC is reporting interesting news about Amazon. “Amazon Has Been Quietly Running an ‘Uber for Trucking’ Service Since Last Year” reports:
Amazon has been testing a new online service that matches truck drivers with shippers since last year, taking its first step into the lucrative online freight brokerage space.
Should FedEx and UPS be worried? Yep, especially UPS. Those Amazon returns are now being handled by Kohl’s, which may provide a hint of Amazon’s approach to deliveries: Disruption and disintermediation.
Amazon Dinged for Plagiarism
Amazon may find itself in another spat with copyright owners. The Digital Reader’s “The Biggest Plagiarism Scandal in the History of eBooks Slipped by Amazon Unnoticed” reported as allegedly true:
CopyPastCris, as the scandal has been dubbed, now includes no fewer than 95 books by 43 authors as well as articles and other content from six websites (and two recipes). Numerous passages have been copied from those books and websites into one or more of Serruya’s published works. Yes, ninety-five books.
Digital Reader points out a possible flaw in Amazon’s publishing system:
While some of the plagiarism was spotted by readers and authors, much of the work to document the plagiarism was done by Ryan. She wrote the algorithm, she supplied the computer time to run it, and she double-checked the results. Isn’t it funny how one programmer could find all this and Amazon did not?
Amazon bulldozes forests, not spindly creative flowers, may be one conclusion the allegedly true write up explicates.
Amazon Highlights Speedy AI Chips
Technology Review reported in its public magazine this story: “This Chip Was Demoed at Jeff Bezos’s Secretive Tech Conference. It Could be Key to the Future of AI.” The headline is intriguing because MIT is one of the outfits inventing the future of smart software. The recognition that an online bookstore is producing chips which could “invent the future of smart software” is quite a revelation.
The write up points out in a less than secret way:
the new chip achieves performance 10 or even 1,000 times more efficient than existing hardware does.
The inventor of the chip is a company called Sze, named after an MIT grad Vivienne Sze. What’s this suggest? Amazon is serious about making its smart software smarter.
Why’s this important? The article provides a clue to those lucky enough to attend the Amazon high-tech conference in 2020:
…expect the eye-catching robots and drones at the next MARS conference to come with something rather special hidden inside.
AWS May Be Getting More Like a Mainframe
“New – Amazon S3 Batch Operations” reveals Amazon S3 Batch Operations which allow customers to “process hundreds, millions, or billions of S3 objects in a simple and straightforward fashion. You can copy objects to another bucket, set tags or access control lists (ACLs), initiate a restore from Glacier, or invoke an AWS Lambda function on each one.” The old is new again.
Make Money with Alexa? Maybe
Amazon wants Alexa developers to make money, in theory. “Alexa In-Skill Purchasing, Which Lets Developers Make Money from Voice Apps, Launches Internationally” states:
With in-skill purchasing, developers are able to generate revenue from voice apps in a number of ways: through the sale of digital goods as a one-time purchase, subscriptions or consumables.
Will this work? DarkCyber does not believe that Alexa has a must-have app winner among the 80,000 or so Alexa skills, but the article identifies a couple of contenders; Escape the Airplane and Jeopardy.
Amazon: Search Engine Optimization Comes to the Online Bookstore
SEO undermined the idea of relevance at ad supported Web search systems. Now the SEO carpetbaggers are setting up to mine the Amazon. “Some Amazon Sellers Are Paying $10,000 A Month To Trick Their Way To The Top” discovered:
An emerging black market offers Amazon sellers pricey ways to cheat the marketplace and mislead customers.
I am not sure about the “emerging” part. Fake reviews for products and books have been a success story for some third parties for more than a decade. Nevertheless, the write up reports with the dewy freshness of a spring morning:
The most prominent black hat companies for US Amazon sellers offer ways to manipulate Amazon’s ranking system to promote products, protect accounts from disciplinary actions, and crush competitors. Sometimes, these black hat companies bribe corporate Amazon employees to leak information from the company’s wiki pages and business reports, which they then resell to marketplace sellers for steep prices. One black hat company charges as much as $10,000 a month to help Amazon sellers appear at the top of product search results. Other tactics to promote sellers’ products include removing negative reviews from product pages and exploiting technical loopholes on Amazon’s site to lift products’ overall sales rankings. These services make it harder for Amazon sellers who abide by the company’s terms of service to succeed in the marketplace, and sellers who rely on these tactics mislead customers and undermine trust in Amazon’s products.
How will this play out? There will be conferences, and there will be some modest push back from Amazon. But business is business. Google now has videos about SEO, the industry which it helped foster.
Amazon Secure Zones: Maybe Yes, Maybe No
ZDNet reported that there is No difference between regular AWS and Australian government protected level services. With Amazon competing for the US government JEDI contract the information in the write up could be significant. The article reported:
When AWS gets a customer with specialist security requirements, it looks to implement those requirements everywhere.
From Amazon’s point of view, security is security, regardless of the customer. From ZDNet’s point of view, the approach is newsworthy. A close reading of the statements by the AWS executive reveals:
By certifying a cloud service …it allows government to consume software-as-a-service more easily, while also making it easier for developers to reach government. … Government customers are looking towards outsourced and managed services, but they often cannot consume them because of security regulations.
The Amazon approach addresses this problem.
Amazon Doing Good in Des Moines
Marketwatch published “Amazon Web Services Become the Community Sponsor of the Monetery Tech Summit.” The news item said:
The Monetery Tech Summit has acted as a funding engine for underrepresented groups in technology. In 2018, the conference raised more than $10,000 for Pi515, an after-school program that educates Iowa’s underserved population, particularly refugee 7-12th grade students, on computer coding.
Amazon Blockchain
This struck DarkCyber as old news, but Cointelegraph seemed excited. “Amazon Web Services Launches Managed Blockchain Service.” The article disclosed:
The product will purportedly allow customers to set up blockchain networks within their organizations, and uses the Ethereum and Hyperledger open source frameworks. Notably, Amazon states that AMB can scale to support thousands to millions of transactions.
News of the service surfaced last year, and DarkCyber has pointed out that the information from such a service might have above average interest in some sectors of the law enforcement community.
Autonomic Drives to Amazon
Yahoo reported that “AWS will power Autonomic Transportation Mobility Cloud, giving automotive manufacturers and software developers the cloud infrastructure needed to build innovative connected vehicle services at scale.” As previously noted, Ford is in on the AWS game.
Amazon Advertises Its Conference
The low profile Amazon conferences are low profile no more. Amazon is advertising its reMARS conference. Here’s an example:
You can find this on on TechCrunch.
Amazon and Ethereum
Use the Bit reported that Amazon could start using Ethereum for New Scalable Blockchain. We thought this was already in place with some interesting implications for Amazon’s policeware business.
Amazon Epyc
AnandTech reported that AWS offers another AMD Epyc Powered Instance: T3a. The naming of Amazon services is — to be straightforward — quite an art. T3a is for the Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud, not to be confused with Elastic, the company which developed Elasticsearch. Amazon is beavering away with Elastic in order to suck in “run it on our stuff” business. Back to the Epyc T3a service. We learned:
AWS’s T3a instances offer burstable performance and are intended for workloads that have low sustained throughput needs, but experience temporary spikes in usage. Amazon says that users of T3a get an assured baseline amount of processing power and can scale it up “to full core performance” when they need more for as long as necessary.
The article, rather unhelpfully adds, “Previously AWS started to offer M5, R5, M5ad, and R5ad instances based on AMD’s latest server processors.”
Stephen E Arnold, May 6, 2019
Amazonia for April 29, 2019
April 29, 2019
Amazon has shifted gears. According to a publication with which I am not familiar, a law student has evidence that Amazon has violated anti-trust laws. You can get the student’s views in “Is Amazon Violating US Antitrust Laws?” and if you prefer an analysis from someone other than a student, navigate to Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor, Say Open Source Developers.”
And in other Amazon bulldozer new, DarkCyber cataloged these items:
Amazon’s Big Quarter
Lots of big numbers for Q1 2019. Example: 12 week revenue of about $8 billion. Example: AWS revenue growth of about 40 percent. Here’s one factoid to which one may want to pay attention:
AWS is Amazon’s fastest growing division and produces the largest margins. This segment has been growing at an annual rate ranging from 43% to 55% for the last 3 years and grew 41% in Q1 YoY. AWS offers the business 39% operating margin compared to the 4.2% margin that the rest of Amazon’s operations are providing. This segment already makes up about 50% of AMZN’s income and will likely continue to grow.
The downside? Growth may be slowing, hence Amazon’s new initiatives. The Register’s comment that Amazon was a cloud business with a gift shop may be correct.
Source: Yahoo
Digital Freight Brokerage
Amazon is a logistics company. Using its internal system, Amazon is positioned to reduce the time for deliveries on some items. How does same day delivery sound to those too busy or uninterested in going to a retail store? Sounds good to DarkCyber.
“Amazon’s Digital Freight Brokerage Platform Goes Live” brings logistics goodness to anyone looking for efficiency. What may be more important than Amazon’s technical acumen is its ability to engage in friendly competition. In this context, “friendly competition” means prices that are about 30 percent lower than what incumbents charge for similar freight forward brokering.
The write up reports:
The entry of Amazon into freight brokerage is the ‘disintermediate to survive’ phase of the flywheel. AMZN is under pressure to re-accelerate its top line revenue, which has slowed from upward of 30 percent annually three years ago to less than 15 percent projected for this year. Amazon cannot allow trucking capacity to constrain its growth and is entering freight brokerage to lock that capacity up.
Remember those statements by some industry observers who suggested that Amazon benefited outfits like FedEx and UPS (love the color its trucks).
Want to ship something at a peak time of year? Amazon is ready to serve as it pressures the companies against which it is competing — in a friendly way. DarkCyber believes that unlike vendors of policeware, the freight forwarding and brokering sector may be reading what the electronic bookstore has written in its AWS terms and conditions.
Amazon: Responding to the Sound of Music
The bulldozer’s music story this week, in DarkCyber’s opinion, was the information about Amazon’s possible music streaming play. (Amazon has been doing the music thing for years, of course.) “Amazon could Launch Hi-Def Music Streaming by End of 2019” reported:
Amazon’s music streaming service has been around for a while now, but more recently the company seems to be stepping up their efforts to try and grab a larger slice of the pie. For example, it was just last week that Amazon announced a free ad-supported listening tier that would allow non-Prime members to enjoy their streaming services.
Higher quality files may be less important than free or low cost music. Maybe Amazon will add high fidelity podcasts to the mix. What’s the podcast count? A half million or so, including our generally ignored DarkCyber weekly video.
A useful factoid may be that CNBC reported that Amazon will spend $7 billion on music content in 2019.
Open Source Inside a Closed Amazon: The Rent-a-Car Approach
Chatter about Amazon’s tactical plan to attack open source developers seems to be working. The approach is controversial. Medium published the essay “Amazon Has Gone From Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor, Say Open Source Developers.” The main idea seems to be encapsulated in this statement by a commentator on open source software:
called Amazon’s move a “hostile takeover” of Elastic’s business. Steven O’Grady, co-founder of the software industry analyst firm RedMonk, cited it as an example of the “existential threat” that open source companies like Elastic believe a handful of cloud computing giants could pose. Shay Banon, founder and CEO of Elastic, carefully defended Elastic’s new licensing practices, while at the same time making his unhappiness with Amazon crystal clear.
Now what did my grandfather used to say about the barn burned down and the horses ran off? Yes, I recall his statement: “Yep, a bulldozer company is building a factory on that spot.”
What do you think Confluent, Datastax, Neo4j, MongoDB, and InfluxData think about Amazon’s tactical play? DarkCyber sees believes that renting access to another’s work is logical— for Amazon. The open source coder? DarkCyber has no fixed viewpoint.
Enter the Lawyers Arrive
Engadget has reported that “Amazon Tries Bringing in Lawyers for Sellers Claiming Patent Infringement.” The angle is that Amazon has had a problem with knock offs. Without plowing through the legal ramifications of selling a look alike as the real deal, Amazon is trying to gin up “a cheaper, faster alternative to traditional patent lawsuits, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and take years to settle.”
Alexa, Who Fired Me?
The Verge reported that Amazon warehouse workers can be terminated for productivity lapses. Who does the firing of the inefficient humanoid? Smart software. The news service reported:
The documents also show a deeply automated tracking and termination process. “Amazon’s system tracks the rates of each individual associate’s productivity,” according to the letter, “and automatically generates any warnings or terminations regarding quality or productivity without input from supervisors.” (Amazon says supervisors are able to override the process.)
Amazon gets a word in. The Verge reports Amazon said:
Amazon consistently terminates fulfillment center associates for failing to repeatedly meet the standardized productivity rates,” the company’s attorney wrote in the letter. Amazon terminated the employee, the attorney wrote, “for the same reason it has terminated hundreds of other employees without regard to any alleged protected concerted activity.” The former employee’s charge was ultimately withdrawn.
The Verge story includes images of documents and other details.
Actual Unemployed Real Journalist Opportunity
Amazon may have a job for you. Navigate to this link and check out how Amazon is approaching local news. Why didn’t Tim Andrews (Patch and AOL) think of this? Oh, right. He was a Googler. Quick question: Identify three ways this type of information complements the AWS policeware service. Give up. Sigh.
Amazon’s Jungle Drums
Some items to tuck away in an Amazon notebook:
- Slack’s new deal with Amazon translates to about $250 million through 2023 to AWS. (This may be less than Lyft or Pinterest will pay.) Source: Geekwire
- Ford Motor Company has decided that the Bezos bulldozer’s electronics and software are interesting. Source: Yahoo
- Apple spends $30 million a month for AWS. Apple may be taking steps to trim this monthly bill. Source: CNBC
- AWS has opened a Hong Kong data center region. Alibaba and TenCent may face hear the grinding of the Bezos bulldozer which might be silenced by government regulations. Source: SDXCentral
- AWS ahs announced general availability of concurrency scaling for Redshift, a data warehouse service. Source: Market Watch
- AWS announced general availability of Amazon S3 Deep Glacier Archive, which is the lowest cost storage option available from AWS at this time. Source: Yahoo
Servicers of the Bezos Bulldozer
Vendors with which are generally not familiar are embracing the Amazon AWS environment.
- Corvil becomes an advanced technical partner for AWS. Source: Bakersfield
- Immuta has become an advanced technical partner for AWS. Source: Business Wire
- Instana Automatic Application Monitoring is now available on AWS. Source: Virtual Strategy
- Perspectium provides integration services for AWS. Source: Odessa American
- TigerGraph is available as a pay as you go analytics service on AWS. Source: Globe Newswire
- Vapor IO and Crown Castle have developed to connect these firms services to AWS. Source: LightReading
Stephen E Arnold, April 29, 2019
Amazonia for April 22, 2019
April 22, 2019
Amazon continues to grind forward.
Amazon Fails Where Google Struggled: China
China is a big market. China is a country. Armies, police, regulators, and a history of following its leaders. Amazon learned that it, like Google, could not change China. This is a surprise? “Amazon Plans to Shut Down China Marketplace in Rare Retreat” reports:
In a rare retreat for Amazon.com Inc., the e-commerce giant plans to shut down its Chinese marketplace business in July as it shifts its focus to offering mainland consumers overseas products rather than goods from local sellers.
But Amazon will not give up. Even Mark Zuckerberg learned to speak Chinese so he could continue to spread the word about Facebook goodness.
Amazon will keep running its other businesses in China, including Amazon Web Services, Kindle e-books, and cross-border operations that help ship goods from Chinese merchants to customers abroad. Starting on July 18, customers logging in to Amazon’s Chinese web portal, Amazon.cn, will only see a selection of goods from its global store, rather than products from third-party sellers.
Will Amazon triumph in China? That depends on what one means by identifying a victory. DarkCyber does not think the definition will include impinging on Alibaba and JD.com, among other China favorites.
Amazon and Google: Learning to Coexist
DarkCyber noted that the high school science club spat with the high school mathematics club has ended. Amazon’s FireTV will show YouTube videos. Peace in our Time reported:
In a mutual announcement, the two online giants have revealed that they’re collaborating on bringing their services to the other’s devices. “In the coming months,” the YouTube app will be coming back to the Fire TV (Amazon’s devices and Fire TV Edition smart TVs). It will be followed later this year by the YouTube TV and YouTube Kids apps as well. On Amazon’s side, the Prime Video app will add support for casting “in the coming months,” thus supporting Google’s first-party Chromecasts and other Chromecast built-in devices.
Ah, beautiful music to some ears. But wait. Music is not included. The two clubs are likely to meet up in the high school cafeteria to talk about tunes, DarkCyber opines.
Amazon: Staff Management: Energy and Green Edition
Several thousand Amazon staff want Amazon to do more for saving the planet. The issue is not resolved. What triggered the pushback from happy, content, sleek, and well benefited employees. DarkCyber suggests that the firm’s commitment to renewable energy farms half a world away from Seattle were insufficient. Amazon has some deals with Big Energy to help these oil and gas outfits extract carbon sources from Mother Earth. See “Amazon Employees to Execs: Do More on Climate Change” for some exhaust on the subject. Key point: Amazon management faces a management hot spot. First, a supermarket magazine dust up, then the China problem, and now people one pays to do the company’s honest, meaningful labor. Perhaps a Harvard Business School podcast will offer the online bookstore some advice?
Amazon Partners: Implementing the New, Improved IBM Approach to Sales Continues
Some partners of Amazon revealed some of the Amazon plans. Here’s a few which caught our eye:
- Antian offers its compliance services via Amazon. Source: Geekwire
- AzCopy has improved its S3 data transfer service. Source: Redmond Magazine
- Business Software, an income tax services firm, is now an AWS believer. Source: Virtual Strategy
- Inplayer offers video monetizing services for Amazon. Source: OAOA, part of Aim Media in Texas
- Instana introduced its cloud management services for Amazon. Source: Virtual Strategy
- McAfee achieves Amazon certification. Plus, Amazon has identified McAfee as well architected. Source: Marketwatch
- Phynd, a health care transformation specialist, expanded its Amazon-centric services. The name suggests search, but it seems more of a workflow and content management play. Source: PRNewswire
- Perspectium provides customer support services via Amazon. The firm also uses Press of Atlantic City for its news releases which wants to charge for marketing information. Annoying indeed. If the link goes dead, think bush league PR play.
- Pyramid Systems is now an advanced consulting partner for Amazon. Sounds good thought. And, no, DarkCyber does not know what the different levels of partner mean. Source: PRNewswire
- Tetrate offers Envoy to AWS Mesh users who want micro services for their Web-accessible applications. Source: Marketwatch
- TigerGraph uses AWS for “pay as you go” graph analytics. Source: Globe News Wire
Amazon: Going the Right Direction Says Yahoo, Verizon, Oath, AOL or Whatever
Despite the mini-crises causing the Bezos bulldozer’s engine to rev, “Jeff Bezos Is Leading Amazon in the Right Direction.” And Verizon should know; it is a paragon of management excellence. According to the company which may have cribbed some ideas from Smarter Analyst:
The founder of Amazon has managed to keep an innovative culture going while they continue to disrupt e-commerce. Bezos anticipates that Amazon can continue to grow its e-commerce footprint in various markets outside the United States where there has been minimal market penetration of e-commerce in general.
Spot on, Yahoooooooo.
For Fans of Amazon’s Policeware
Amazon has added Arabic to the line up of languages which the Amazon Polly system can understand. CRN points out that the service is designed for consumer applications; for example:
The move allows developers to create applications that speak in Arabic and build speech-enabled products and services, including cars, internet of things devices, appliances, automated contact centers, language learning platforms, translation apps and newsreaders.
JEDI: A Down to Earth Battle Between Digital Super Powers
April 20, 2019
This may be good news for China and Russia. Nextgov predicts, “Without JEDI, Pentagon’s Artificial Intelligence Efforts May Be Hindered.” The Pentagon requires an enterprise cloud computing solution for its ambitious AI plans—once it gets past one little snag, that is. They had a plan, called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, but it is now on hold pending litigation. Reporter Frank Konkel writes:
“Through the JEDI contract, the Pentagon aims to put a commercial company in charge of hosting and distributing mission-critical workloads and classified data to warfighters around the globe in a single cloud computing environment. That environment would also process large swaths of military and defense data and serve as the computing and analytics workhorse for artificial intelligence applications.
Motley Fool reports in “An Unexpected Scandal Threatens To Cripple Amazon”:
the Department of Defense (DoD) cleared itself of wrongdoing following an internal investigation into the forthcoming award of the $10 billion cloud computing Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative (JEDI) program. Yet the Pentagon’s self-exoneration was not comprehensive, as Bloomberg noted that: “The investigation uncovered evidence of unethical conduct that will be referred to the DoD inspector general for a separate review.”
Nations like China will not oblige us by putting their AI plans on hold while we catch up. The DoD could try using a hardware stack instead, but that would severely constrict their plans, according to Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, head of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center.
Is DarkCyber surprised? A better question, “What was the business ethos of DH Shaw when Mr. Bezos honed his financial and business skills at that Wall Street firm?”
DarkCyber does not know.
Cynthia Murrell, April 20, 2019
Amazonia for April 15, 2019
April 15, 2019
An interesting week in Amazon’s ebookstore. Jeff Bezos’ annual shareholder letter contains many nuggets. The one DarkCyber found thought provoking was also noted by ZDNet. “In Amazon Shareholder Letter, Bezos Says AWS Targeting Specialized Databases for Specialized Workloads”, I noted this passage:
AWS itself – as a whole – is an example. No one asked for AWS. No one. Turns out the world was in fact ready and hungry for an offering like AWS but didn’t know it. We had a hunch, followed our curiosity, took the necessary financial risks, and began building – reworking, experimenting, and iterating countless times as we proceeded.
ZDNet’s story adds:
From there, Bezos drops a few lines that make AWS a bit of an obsession for Oracle, a database giant. Bezos said the AWS army of databases has been informed by enterprise customers “constrained by their commercial database options and had been unhappy with their database providers for decades.
The idea is that outfits like Oracle Database, IBM DB2, and to some degree Microsoft with its SQLServer construct have offered an engine. Happy licensees and database administrators would dutifully write scripts and use vendor-certified tools.
The future, as DarkCyber understands it, is many different databases, each with different capabilities. Once these are in the AWS environment, AWS developers and their customers can pick a tool and get on with real work.
Want SQL? Amazon has Aurora. Want to make Elasticsearch grunt through log files? AWS can do that with its own stretchy search engine and log file tools. Want to do Googley-things? AWS offers DynamoDB.
Other points:
- Third party resellers are making money even though Amazon could fall behind in the revenue and profit department
- Amazon wants, needs, has to fail
- Pesky customers don’t know what they want
- Amazon is not big in retail
- Amazon has raised its minimum wage so the competition can follow the leader.
Chug, chug, chug goes the Bezos bulldozer. Like some big machines, sometimes ants, jaguars, and the odd competitor gets crushed.
JEDI Squash Game: Final Match
Amazon and Microsoft are the finalists in the squash game for the JEDI contract. Microsoft got some love with its virtual reality award. Plus many DoD professionals cannot live without PowerPoint. Amazon has some government work too. GeekWire reports:
it will be interesting to see how public the companies are willing to be in pursuit of the deal.
Yes, it will be interesting. For the government, for the companies, and for the lawyers representing the outfit which loses the contract.
AWS Deep Learning Containers
Containers make it easy to put related stuff in one place. The holiday ornaments go in Box A, and the old kitchen items go in box 2. Amazon’s deep learning containers are smarter. InfoQ reveals:
AWS DL [Docker] Containers were created by Amazon to remove the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” for customers who regularly use Amazon EKS and ECS to deploy their TensorFlow workloads to the cloud. Amazon has also optimized the images for use on AWS to reduce training time and increase inferencing performance.
You can read the Amazon write up at this link. The main idea is that setting up and doing smart software is getting easier, better, faster, cheaper (allegedly). Just fill in the blanks:
Want more? Search Amazon for cloud. Helpful tip.
Building Bridges to Oman
Amazon visited Oman.The subject of the visit was sales and probably some chatter about other Amazon services. Was policeware on the agenda? DarkCyber does not know. According to Zawya, the reason for the meeting was:
to explore the investment opportunities in the field of information and communication technology and eCommerce as well as identifying the promising markets in the Sultanate.
Ecommerce was a focal point. Policeware? Not mentioned in the source report.
First, It Was Hollywood. Now It Is Big Oil
The Brownsville Herald reported:
Amazon is getting cozy with the oil industry — and some employees aren’t happy about it…
The company is now courting oil producers to Amazon Web Services, which offers cloud computing services to government agencies and major companies, such as video-streaming service Netflix and digital scrapbooking site Pinterest. AWS is one of Amazon’s biggest money makers, accounting for more than 70% of Amazon’s total profit last year.
What’s the angle? Amazon sells its data analytics and other services to Shell and BP. Amazon wants more big oil customers. Is an employee protest percolating?
More Robotics
Business Insider, an outfit seemingly desperate for email addresses and money, reported that Amazon acquired Canvas Technology. The Colorado robot shop makes a robot cart. The cart “carts”. Robots do not require bathroom breaks, meals, or psychological counseling yet.
Amazon Employees Want Climate Change Policies
Herald and News reported that Amazon is into wind energy. But Amazon employees want more climate action from Amazon. This is not save Amazon the company. This is save Amazon the jungle. The newspaper said:
In an unprecedented public push to change Amazon policies, nearly 4,500 employees have put their names to a letter asking CEO Jeff Bezos and the commerce giant’s board of directors to become global leaders in fighting climate change.
Now about the big boxes to send little products? No information, but Amazon has signed three wind farm deals. Those megawatts come online by 2021, In the meantime, chug chug chug does the bulldozer which runs on diesel fuel.
Partner and Developer Quick Clicks
Some items which provide some information about the growing reach of Amazon is the community of vendors of which most people have never heard:
- Napatech. A line of FPGA (floating point gate array) hardware for Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. The “solution” provides network encryption and description. Source: PR Newswire
- Prancer. A new cloud validation framework. This is a connector to make it possible to check up on Amazon AWS if you are a client of the bulldozer. Source: Yahoo Finance
- ZephyrTel. A strategic collaboration with Amazon AWS. Source: Business Wire on Yahoo
Amazon Cash Pivot
The no people, no cash approach may not be working. Pesky humans and their resistance to change. Yahoo reported that Amazon’s automated stores may start accepting cash. Soon. Source: Yahoo
Amazon: Now a VC Broker
CNBC reported in “AWS Bets on Services Portfolio Amidst Increasing APAC Cloud Competition”:
Amazon is testing a new way to bolster its relationship with start-ups and possibly bring in more capital to the ecosystem. The fledgling effort, known as the Amazon Web Services Pro-Rata Program, is designed to link private investors with companies that use AWS, as well as venture funds whose portfolios are filled with potential cloud customers. Amazon is not investing money through the program.
Didn’t Mr. Bezos work on Wall Street? He probably is no longer influenced by that work. What do you think?
One More Thing…
Apple Insider reports that Bezos bulldozer operators listen to Echo audio. For the allegedly true real news story navigate to “Thousands of Amazon Workers Are Listening In On Echo Audio, Report Says.” We believe reports.
Stephen E Arnold, April 15, 2019
Amazon Moved a Knight. Google Pushes a Pawn
April 10, 2019
If you care about search and retrieval, you may be interested in the chess game underway between Amazon and Google. Amazon seized the initiative by embracing the open source Elasticsearch. Google, an outfit whose failures in search are known to anyone who licensed a Google Search Appliance, has responded. The pawn Google nudged forward is Elastic, the outfit which has been a big dog in search and retrieval for several years.
According to “Elastic and Google Cloud Expand Elasticsearch Service Partnership”:
Elastic (NYSE: ESTC) and Google Cloud (GCP) announced the expansion of their managed Elasticsearch Service partnership to make it faster and easier for users to deploy Elasticsearch within their Google Cloud Platform (GCP) accounts. Building upon the partnership to deliver Elastic’s Elasticsearch Service on GCP, the companies announced a fully managed, cloud-native integration for discovery, billing, and support for Elasticsearch Service within the GCP Console.
We also circled this statement, which is quite fascinating when interpreted in the context of Amazon’s open source tactic:
Elastic’s Elasticsearch Service on GCP gives users a turnkey experience to deploy powerful Elastic Stack features of Elasticsearch and Kibana, including proprietary free and paid features such as security, alerting, machine learning, Kibana spaces, Canvas, Elasticsearch SQL, and cross-cluster search. In addition, users can deploy new curated solutions for logging, infrastructure monitoring, mapping and geospatial analysis, and APM; optimize compute, memory, and storage workloads using Elastic’s customizable deployment templates such as hot-warm architecture for the logging use case; and upgrade to the latest version of Elasticsearch and Kibana as soon as it is released with a single click.
The chess timer is Amazon’s. Will the company make a lucid move?
Stephen E Arnold, April 10, 2019
Amazonia for April 8, 2019
April 8, 2019
The Bezos bulldozer was grinding along last week. The big celebrity news was the creation of a new world billionaire once married to the online bookstore’s founder. There were some less interesting developments the DarkCyber research team spotted. Here’s a selection of semi-interesting items.
Eero: A Deal?
If the information in “Amazon Bought Eero for $97 Million and Employees Still Got Screwed” is accurate, the easy networking outfit made some of its employees unhappy. Here’s the passage we noted:
According to confidential documents viewed by Mashable, Amazon acquired Eero for $97 million. Eero executives brought home multi-million dollar bonuses and eight-figure salary increases. Everyone else, however, didn’t fare quite so well. Investors took major hits, and the Amazon acquisition rendered Eero stock worthless: $0.03 per share, down from a common stock high of $3.54 in July 2017. It typically would have cost around $3 for employees to exercise their stock, meaning they would actually lose money if they tried to cash out.
Didn’t venture capitalists pump more money into the company? Maybe employees and investors got a lesson in how to be a billionaire?
Amazon in Space
Google does Loon balloons. Facebook likes gliders. Amazon wants to put 3,000 satellites in space to deliver Internet connectivity to those who want to buy a Kindle ebook. We learned:
The effort, code-named Project Kuiper, follows up on last September’s mysterious reports that Amazon was planning a “big, audacious space project” involving satellites and space-based systems. The Seattle-based company is likely to spend billions of dollars on the project, and could conceivably reap billions of dollars in revenue once the satellites go into commercial service.
DarkCyber wants to know, “Will Amazon use the Bezos space rocket to put these devices into orbit?” Source: Geekwire. As a prank a clever person created a mock up of an Amazon blimp or Loon balloon deploying drones.
Rekognition Facial Recognition May Face a “Rekoning”
DarkCyber does not know much about shareholder meetings. Apparently the subject of Amazon’s licensing of its facial recognition technology to law enforcement and government agencies is an issue for some. We learned that shareholders will have an opportunity to vote on where Amazon can sell its FAR systems. Who decided? Mr. Bezos? Nope, the Securities & Exchange Commission. Google has sparked some fierce discussion with its refusal to work on a government project. What will happen if Amazon disables its FAR systems? DarkCyber believes that some entities will be unhappy. Source: Verge
Hello, Air Pods the Amazon Basics Way
Poor Apple. It cannot make butterfly keyboards. The Cupertino giant cannot craft a wireless charging mat. The spirit of Jobs seems to have departed with version two of its wireless ear phones. Never fear. Amazon is going to release its own version, which will interact with Amazon’s services. DarkCyber is more interested in possible LE and intel applications of this particular chunk of Amazon’s technology. Source: Bloomberg
Amazon and Health Care
Google and Microsoft have bailed out of their health care initiatives. Not Amazon. DarkCyber learned that Alexa will be gussied up with medical expertise. Interested in what Amazon allegedly will do? DarkCyber is too. Information about certain medical conditions could be useful in some investigations. Source: Venture Beat
Amazon and Fairness Research
DarkCyber did not spot too many tweets about Amazon’s sponsoring research about fairness. A newspaper reported:
Amazon has partnered with the taxpayer-funded National Science Foundation on a three-year, $20 million program to fund basic research into fairness in artificial intelligence systems, which are under increasing scrutiny as they spread in society and sometimes amplify existing biases.
“Fair” is a word like “quality.” Tough to define. So far the company has not abandoned the project. Google jettisoned its public ethics group. But Amazon may be paid for this effort to tackle a very fuzzy concept. DarkCyber asks, “What’s “fair” when it comes to lavatory breaks in an Amazon warehouse? Source: Seattle Times
Amazon Reduces Some Prices at Whole Foods
We don’t have a Whole Paycheck (sorry, I meant Whole Foods) here in Harrod’s Creek. We do have a saloon, a bar, a restaurant and bar, a filling station with a wood stove and old times. No Whole Feeds. The new reported in “Amazon Slashes Prices on Hundreds of Whole Foods Items” was greeted with silence. The local Kroger manager asked one of the DarkCyber research team, “What’s a Whole Foods?”
Good Bye, Oracle
Amazon once was a good Oracle customer. Oracle license fees. Oracle add ons. Oracle data base administrators. Oracle World speaking opportunities. If an Amazonia were lucky, a nifty Oracle hat. No more. Amazon uses its “own” database technology now, thank you, very much Larry Ellison. According to one British computer publication, Amazon’s database team held a “thank heavens, it is outta here” party. Don’t let the PL/SQL documentation fall on your head. Source: Computing
Hi, Microsofties. We’re Neighbors
Some Amazon employees will be relocating their offices to Bellevue, Washington. We learned from Geekwire:
Amazon plans to relocate its entire Seattle-based worldwide operations team to Bellevue, Wash., by 2023, adding thousands of employees to its new campus just across Lake Washington, according to an internal email obtained by GeekWire.
Yeah, about that security for corporate email? If true, Seattle’s city fathers may want to ask themselves, “What did we do wrong?” On the other hand, Microsoft may have its own questions. One big winner will be the Bellevue real estate specialists. Let’s not overlook this Amazon initiative: “Amazon Web Services Sharpens Its Focus on Cloud Security.” Internal email included or not?
An Amazon Alexa Robot May Be Developed
DarkCyber noted that a walking Alexa may be developed by Amazon’s engineers. We noted this passage in “Alexa’s Chief Scientist Wants to Give the Voice Assistant a Robot Body”:
Speaking at The EmTech Digital A.I .Conference held by MIT Technology Review in San Francisco, Prasad raised the idea of letting Alexa learn about the world by experiencing it like a human might. “The only way to make [a]smart assistant really smart is to give it eyes and let it explore the world,” he said. That would include giving Alexa a physical form. While the idea might seem a little out there, we’re already closer to the possibility than one might imagine. In some cases, Alexa already has access to “eyes” of sorts, as some devices with Alexa installed include cameras that the A.I. can access. A body would be a considerable jump in progression, of course, but it is a possibility. That said, Prasad didn’t confirm whether Amazon is already working on building a body for its voice assistant.
Source: Digital Trends
Jim Henson Shows on Amazon, Just Not in the US
We learned in “Jim Henson Shows Come to Amazon Prime Video, but Not in the US” that licensing spoils the fun:
Amazon has added a lot more Jim Henson Company programs to Prime Video after rolling out all four season of sci-fi series Farscape for the platform. Starting today, you’ll be able to access 2,500 hours of child-friendly shows with Muppets and other Henson puppets if you have a Prime or a standalone Prime Video subscription. That is, depending on where you’re located — unfortunately, most of those programs won’t be available in the US due to licensing issues.
Source: Engadget
Audio Watermarking
Was that secret recording subsequently modified? Amazon may have technology which could answer this question. An Amazon ebook lover wrote a journal article with the alluring title “Audio Watermarking over the Air with Modulated Self Correlation.” You can find a copy of the free article at this link.
Amazon Gets More Twitchy
“AWS Introduces API Specification for Securing On-Demand and Live Video” reveals that its the Secure Packager and Encoder Exchange (SPEKE) for video are available. DarkCyber noted:
The SPEKE specification aims to eliminate this one-off, customization requirement and replace the old with a standardized method. SPEKE-enabled servers and encryptors should greatly improve time to market for services regardless of consumption method (on-premises, cloud, hybrid, etc.). SPEKE is built on the DASH Industry Forum’s Content Protection Information Exchange Format (CPIX) standard. The API specification supports HLS, MSS and DASH packaging. Many DRM platforms (e.g. Apple FairPlay Streaming, Microsoft PlayRead, Google Widevine, AES-128 and more) are already supported.
Could the best of YouTube find its way to an Amazon Twitch-like service. Some disenchanted Vimeo customers might find this information interesting as well.
Amazon May Gun for Roku
Medium (an outfit which wants email addresses in exchange for articles) published “Amazon Asks Advertisers to Pledge Millions for Roku Rival.” Makes sense. Amazon wants to gobble revenue, and advertising seems to be an obvious money spout. Read the write up in Medium. Nothing like trading a story told in a headline for an email.
Amazon Complexity
Skimfeed published an interesting statement. Here it is:
@jeffbigham: The 2nd day of the month is my favorite day because it’s when I get a $9.95 bill from AWS for something I can’t figure out how to shut down.
If you want a free run down of “everything” Amazon, you may find “Amazon AWS: Complete Business Guide to the World’s Largest Provider of Cloud Services” helpful. Or not. The write up is short, incomplete, and generally without the information @jeffbigham requires.
Amazon Goes to Bogota
Bogota has an excellent climate. It will also have an Amazon infrastructure facility. According to “Amazon Web Services to Open Infrastructure Location in Colombia”:
Amazon Web Services (AWS), a unit of Amazon.com Inc, said … it will open a Latin America infrastructure location in Colombia and help train 2,000 students in cloud technology. The company will team up with Colombia’s public technical education institute to train students in cloud computing, Jeffrey Kratz, AWS’ general public sector manager for Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada, said in a government statement.
Fleets of EC2 Instances. Fleets!
If you are a government agency and have a great deal of data to crunch, EC2 fleets may be of interest. The idea is that one can automate the creation of multiple instances. The method is to fill in a form. We learned:
hen you create a fleet, the virtual machine (VM) instances within the fleet will be based on a launch template. Launch templates are used to create VM instances in a standardized way. A launch template might, for instance, define the network interfaces, storage volumes and tags that are to be used by EC2 instances created from the template.
More information is available in Virtualization Review’s explanation “Use Amazon EC2 Fleets to Create Collections of EC2 Instances”, which is handier than Amazon’s documentation.
More Partners and Integrators
We jotted down the names of partners and integrators of things AWS not appearing in our files; to wit:
Stephen E Arnold, April 8, 2019
Amazonia for April 1, 2019
April 1, 2019
These are not April Fool items. Each appeared before publication in the sources identified below. If some of the items seem wonky, not my doing.
Was Bezos a Victim of Policeware?
Is this true or false? We don’t know. The Daily Beast reported on March 30, 2019, that an Amazon investigation suggested that Jeff Bezos was a victim of policeware spying. The story “Bezos Investigation Finds the Saudis Obtained His Private Data” contains the allegedly accurate details. Thinking about the political and legal implications of the information in the allegedly accurate article is outside the scope of this humble run down of news items about everyone’s favorite online bookstore. Perhaps others can answer such questions as when, who, why and how?
Amazon and Its Economists
Economists and I assume behavioral psychologists are surprised at the attention each professional group receives from the tech savvy crowd. According to “Amazon Gets an Edge with its Secret Squad of PhD Economists”:
Amazon is now a large draw from the relatively small talent pool of PhD economists, which in the United States grows by about only 1,000 new graduates every year. Although the definition of “economist” is fuzzy, the discipline is generally understood as the study of how people use resources and respond to incentives.
Amazon allegedly has on its team more than 150 economists. If the economists are students of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” staff meetings may be more thrilling than a mid term lecture in Economics 101.
Will one of these professionals become a Hal Varian-scale thinker?
Apple Leaves Amazon an Opening, Free and Clear
The Verge reported that Amazon is “working on a free Fire TV news app.” Free may be more appealing that $120 a year for 300 magazines. Some in the weird scrollable PDF like format and others in Apple’s own proprietary format. The Verge sees the inspiration as Roku. Amazon may know that print centric services are not selling like hot cakes on the Amazon online store; thus, the focus is on where the eyeballs are—video. But there’s more free stuff from Amazon. If you are a Prime member, you get Switch online. Free is a compelling value proposition, or it is if you are into Nintendo games.
Africa and Amazon’s Banking Play
In my lectures about Amazon’s policeware, I described the financial information flowing through the firm’s infrastructure. It is interesting that Amazon is becoming more overt in its efforts to become a global financial systems. The company has cut a deal to become what Forbes called “Africa’s first bank in the cloud.” Amazon’s partner is Standard Bank. Note that Microsoft has been chugging away in Africa as well. Google, the Chinese, and assorted colonial nations are making moves as well. The financial services angle is an important one because Amazon has kept its financial moves under wraps for some time. Are regulators on top of this?
Amazon and Cost Management
Amazon received some coverage in the Seattle Times in the story “Amazon Finds an Alternative Workforce through Northwest Center, a Seattle Nonprofit Helping People with Disabilities.” The story explains Amazon’s employment of people with disabilities. I noted this statement:
In 2015, 22 people with disabilities were hired for part-time jobs in Amazon’s Kent sortation center as part of the pilot program. Their performance was tracked against the general employee population on retention, safety, productivity, quality and attendance.
The information in the article seemed dated and did not provide much data about pay and current number of individuals with disability engaged at Amazon.
Does Amazon Have a Lock on the CIA Cloud Business?
The answer may be, “Nope.” According to Bloomberg, a real news service which sometimes does not have sources for its information:
The CIA is preparing to significantly increase its reliance on cloud-computing services, with plans to solicit tens of billions of dollars of work divided among multiple tech companies.
Source: Bloomberg
Amazon and Columbia
South America is on the economic and political radar for 2020. Amazon has announced that it will open an infrastructure operation in Columbia. The region is unsettled in some ways, but Amazon obviously believes the risk is minimal. More information is available from Reuters. Reuters links do go dead, so you may be on your own if this source does not resolve. Complain to Thomson Reuters, not to me, please.
Caipirinha, Anyone?
It’s official. ZDNet reports that Alexa is alive in Brazil. DarkCyber thinks that Brazil’s new president may be interested in Amazon’s policeware too.
The Great Vendor Purge: Walking the Cat Back
Digiday reported that Amazon’s vendor purge is underway in reverse. According to Digiday’s online information service:
Amazon has walked back the decision to terminate a majority of the vendor purchase orders it stopped fulfilling last Monday, but the action has served as a bit of a wake-up call to sellers who are now planning how to protect their businesses by relying less on the e-commerce retailer.
Confusion at the controls of the Bezos bulldozer?
Proprietary Alexa Skills
There’s no mention of Amazon data capture or voice analysis in “Create an Alexa Skill for Your Organization with Alexa for Business Blueprints.” Be aware that this link may not resolve. You may be able to find the post at https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa and scrolling through items. The blog post states:
Private skills are voice-powered capabilities that enhance the Alexa experience while remaining private to members of an Alexa for Business organization. Skill Blueprints are so easy to use, people have used them extensively to create Alexa skills for their households. Now anyone at the office can do the same for their workplace, simply by filling in custom requests and responses in one of dozens of easy-to-use Blueprints. IT administrators can then review and enable that content for the company’s users and managed Alexa-enabled devices.
Interesting? DarkCyber wonders if the data from these private skills will flow into Amazon’s policeware system?
Why Is AWS So Appealing to Some Developer Palates?
“The #AWS EC2 Windows Secret Sauce” is a reminder that Amazon is the new Microsoft, which may come as a bit of news to Google. The online ad giant wants to be Microsoft. If you want a run down of some of the issues one may encounter with Windows in the cloud, Tehnodrone spells how Amazon handles Windows provisioning. Hint: Lots of engineering and more automated functions.
More AWS Computing Horsepower
“Nvidia’s T4 GPUs Are Coming to the AWS Cloud” reports:
The T4, which is based on Nvidia’s Turing architecture, was specifically optimized for running AI models. The T4 will be supported by the EC2 compute service and the Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes.
Your play Google.
Redshift Scales
Who knows what Redshift does? If you are on the Redshift clue train, you will be delighted to learn that Amazon’s data warehouse offer concurrency and is allegedly better and faster than alternatives. More rah rah is available in “AWS Announces General Availability of Concurrency Scaling for Amazon Redshift.”
S3 Glacier: Cheap Archiving
Amazon rolled out discounted storage. This is called Glacier, presumably because near line retrieval move slowly. More information is available in “AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive—the Lowest Cost Storage in the Cloud.”
Amazon Aurora: Another Complexity Block to Master
If AWS is the next Windows, these components are the equivalent of the chunks of capability stuffed in a DLL. The write up in Acolyer’s blog states:
Managing quorum failures is complex. Traditional mechanisms cause I/O stalls while membership is being changed….Aurora is designed for a world with a constant background level of failure.
The idea is to improve reliability. The key point is that the AWS system generates automatic adaptive actions. Some of these may cost money. Automated services which posts increments to fees, is it?
New Partnerships
Here are some of the new partnerships and integration vendors which appear to have Amazon AWS expertise.
- Lightstream, a global leader in cloud technology solutions, network integration and managed-network services now supports Amazon Chime. Chime is a communications service that lets licensees meet, chat, and place business calls inside and outside an organization. Source: New Kerala
- Sisense delivers its analytics via the Amazon Cloud. The service is called the “Elastic Data Hub.” Please, don’t confuse this with the Elastic company or the Elasticsearch open source system. Source: New Kerala
Know What NSA NIPA Means?
Somebody thinks those on LinkedIn do. Monkton.io (no, it is not a town in Maryland and it has nothing to do with monks) said via Harold Smith III on LinkedIn “NSA NIAP compliant mobile apps in weeks, not years.” Source: LinkedIn and search for “Harold Smith III”.
Stephen E Arnold, April 1, 2019
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