Factoids about the Cloud Battles
March 10, 2020
DarkCyber noted “Stress Test the Cloud: Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Azure, GCP.” The write up presents “factoids” and observations based on these factoids in a helpful way. Here are the points which captured DarkCyber’s attention:
The cloud will be the way of the future in computing. The meltdown of Robinhood’s trading platform was pegged on stress. When a cloud system is stressed, it may and will fail.
Amazon Web Services
- “Amazon’s e-commerce business is the market leader in the U.S., Europe, and close to number 1 in India”
- “AWS is very much battle-tested and constantly “stressed out” by its parent company’s core e-commerce operation. It has moved all of its businesses onto AWS, and off of other systems like Oracle, after a multi-year effort.”
- Amazon’s businesses are generally not prone to unexpected spikes in traffic, which happens more to social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Weibo.”
Amazon’s system may not be optimal for surprise spikes.
Alibaba Cloud
- “Alibaba’s core e-commerce business has many similarities to Amazon’s…”
- “This accomplishment is well-deserved; Alibaba has basically created and survived the mother of all stress tests.” The reference is to the large volume of sales on Singles Day.
- “Alibaba Cloud’s technical and operational expertise can certainly be applied in regions outside of China, but only until there’s customer demand and the data centers to serve it.”
Alibaba dumped American vendors as part of its journey.
Google Cloud
- “Google has arguably the only, truly global infrastructure, because its services and users are global.”
- “Google‘s services cannot anticipate traffic spikes, unlike a planned shopping holiday, and must be ready wherever, whenever it happens.”
- “Google’s products do not naturally lead to processing many complex transactions, like online shopping orders, offline delivery, or payments.”
Google can accommodate stress, but it’s not so good in Amazon-style transaction complexity.
Microsoft Azure
- “None of these [Microsoft] businesses have to be “always on”, in the same way that an e-commerce marketplace or a search engine needs to be on.”
- “Azure is still doing amazingly well from a revenue and market share standpoint. This success has more to do with Microsoft’s years of experience in selling products into large enterprises and aggressively moving users of its non-cloud license-based products onto the same products that are now on-cloud and subscription-based. Microsoft is very good at being “enterprise ready”, but not that good at being “Internet ready”.”
- “It [Microsoft] has by far the most number of Single-AZ Regions, which has led to outages and issues that could’ve been avoided with a multi-AZ design. Multi-AZ Region is the default in AWS, GCP, and most of Alibaba Cloud.”
Microsoft is good at sales, not so good at the cloud.
Net Net
Alibaba is darned good. At any time the company can push into other markets and create some pain for the American companies it seems.
Stephen E Arnold, March 10, 2020
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