| 4.6 Ops
03. Amazon Web Services (AWS) | |
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| 1. Amazon Web Services: | | 1. AWS is larger than its next 14 competitors - it dominates the industry by a significant margin. AWS has created a monopoly with Microsoft running secord a long way behind - AWS are doing something right. | | 2. We choose not to follow their explosive boom and bust method of working, but most business practices are very good. As an interested party, this page may focus on what may become trading issues in the future. To be fair, AWS services are used in certain areas where it is cost effective to treat AWS as a virtual hardware provider. |
| 2. AWS: | | 1. AWS provide excessive complexity without any standards, without any direction, with ever increasing options and methods of working. Its like having millions of customers and providing many different solutions for each customer. Is if web based services do not need focus, do not need standardization, the long tail can support an infinite number of potential solutions. | | 2. AWS includes Virtual Private Networks (VPN) - instances in different data centers can be configured with a common IP address. Very high levels of availability can be configured from nets of instances that appear as a single IP address. | | 3. AWS compute instances and persistent data stores imply a two-tier architecture for web services - data is network connected to virtual web servers. Load balancing firewalls provide cloud connections to many instances of web servers that all share the same network connected persistent data store. | | 4. AWS is about hardware only - the hardware is populated with any system software of your choice and then everything else has to be done in-house. AWS does not provide web services or application services - a few standard wordpress like packages exist, but nothing like Microsoft Dynamics CRM. LAMP is a standard AWS package that is sold by the hour - one pound per hour is 8760 pounds per year. An oppotunity exists for CRM packages running on AWS instances could be sold to companies - the AWS hardware would be invisible to the customer. | | 5. EC2 means Elastic Cloud Compute service that may be configured as a web or application server. Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) must be installed for administration purposes - a known attack point. | | 6. The cost of learning and relearning evolving AWS technology should not be underestimated. Many weeks solid up front training followed by extensive practical experience is mandatory. An annual retaining budget is also needed to keep up with hundreds of improvements - AWS experienced people are expensive. |
| 3. Microsoft: | | 1. Azure is running a long way behind in second place and may never catch up. Azure has focus on Windows based instances, Office integration and can be said to be optimised towards corporations with massive Windows application deployments. Azure does support Linux and open source solutions, but it is hard to be competitive with others in such a place. Azure with Windows provides a kind of standard Platform as a Service (PAAS), some level of standardization that people canrelate to. | | 2. It is hard to imagine by any company who had fully evaluated all options, would choose Azure as a long term solution. Only a company so locked into legacy Microsoft technology would use Azure until they could evolve away from such an expensive legacy situation. |
| 4. Paradox: | | 1. Every historical industry was highly fragmented at the begining and then standards slowly evolved to create what the customer wanted - a standard plug-compatible way of working. AWS may change how industries evolve and continue to evolve with ever increasing levels of complexity. Because each and every component is competitively priced, the need to consolidate to some general purpose standard solution may never happen. Every customer can have anything they want based on cost and skill - more skills are needed to reduce costs - less skills need more costs. The target customer is the traditional IT department - people with technical skills who can learn a new set of AWS skills. | | 2. AWS leave open a massive SME market for companies that do not have IT skilled people to create an AWS instance - SME can outsource to AWS partners who will do the technical work for them. Economics are the driving factor, how much cheaper can a AWS instance be than a dedicated server - only day-to-day operational costs are significant. To save money with AWS, real technical skills and daily optimisation is needed. To save money with dedicated servers, switch off most services and leave it alone. |
| 5. Oracle and SAP: | | 1. Vendors still using licenses to charge by the user per month have most to loose and our largest market opportunity. Standard software package vendors has virtually no flexibility other than lost of bolt-on extra modules. Software as a service (SAAS) will die as the sharing digital economy takes over - customer do not want software they want a service. Agressive licensing terms by software vendors will drive large companies to AWS and small companies to our bespoke AI assistant where they get a service without software. | | 2. Software Vendors will eventually be liable for security breaches caused by their software - this could be the end of many software vendors. In-house installed software needs to be continually patched by customers - when customer fail to patch, then the software vendors may find they are liable for the security breach. Every backup is a potential security breach as many of the people who can read the backup are not authorized to do have access to the personal data in the backup. Every company needs cyber insurance but that will not cover the customer screwing up backups or downloading personal data to laptops that get stolen. | | 3. Let us be honest, Oracle and SAP were born of an earlier era and do not deserve to survive into a new era - their natural life cycle is comming to an end. |
| 6. Security: | | 1. AWS is reported as having some security risks, but that is simply because customer has to install any security they want. AWS can encrypt the entire persistent data store - for a cost. Customers can deploy secure or insecure application programs. AWS provides hardware is does not provide security - the cloud is just hardware it is not security. | | 2. Eliza with excessive layers of encrypting running on AWS hardware is very secure. If we paid for many AWS data centers, then business continuity could be created - for a cost. AWS can be as secure as any company can afford to make it and 100 times more secure than any in-house servers. |
| 7. A Better Way: | | 1. We have evaluated in depth and proven that a large number of small dedicated servers is more cost effective that AWS. We can deploy server hardware costing less than one hundred pounds, running on 24 volt batteries that are solar charged and air cooled via massive heat sinks. AWS deploy very expensive servers with excessively complex virtual system software that has energy costs ten and a hundred times greater for the same amount of work done. AWS have a architecture that is ten year old, its out of date and cannot take advantage of the new micro-server architecture that Intel and AMD have released. | | 2. We are in a position to add a new data center each month because costs are trivial and micro-servers are just a motherboard with hard drive. Eliza runs on all servers with most data in memory at all times so the hard disk is never a limiting factor. AWS have very complex operating system software that may have an operating cost greater than all our application services. |
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