AWS Announces General Availability of UltraWarm for Amazon Elasticsearch Service - Business Wire |
- AWS Announces General Availability of UltraWarm for Amazon Elasticsearch Service - Business Wire
- Travel Isn’t the Ticket for Amazon’s Cloud - The Wall Street Journal
- AWS' Tim Bray Quits Over Amazon Whistle-Blower Firings - CRN: Technology news for channel partners and solution providers
- Here's How Coronavirus Will Impact Amazon's Profit Growth - The Motley Fool
| AWS Announces General Availability of UltraWarm for Amazon Elasticsearch Service - Business Wire Posted: 05 May 2020 01:40 PM PDT SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the general availability of UltraWarm for Amazon Elasticsearch Service, a new, highly performant, fully managed, low-cost warm storage tier that provides fast, interactive analytics of log data at one-tenth the cost of existing storage options. Amazon Elasticsearch Service makes it simple to collect, analyze, and visualize machine-generated log data from websites, mobile devices, and sensors. UltraWarm for Amazon Elasticsearch Service gives Elasticsearch customers a warm storage tier that both stores large amounts of data cost-effectively and provides the type of snappy, interactive experience that Elasticsearch customers expect. There are no up-front investments required to use UltraWarm, and customers pay a simple hourly rate for the storage provisioned. To get started with UltraWarm please visit https://aws.amazon.com/elasticsearch-service. As more and more applications are built using microservices, containers, and purpose-built data stores, the volume of machine-generated log data is growing exponentially. Real-time analysis of this data has become essential to customers in order to quickly resolve operational and security issues. Amazon Elasticsearch Service is a popular service for log analytics because of its ability to ingest high volumes of log data and analyze it interactively. With this explosive growth of log data, storing and analyzing months' or even years' worth of data is cost-prohibitive at scale. This has led customers to use multiple analytics tools, or delete valuable data, missing out on important insights that the longer-term data could yield. To solve for this customer challenge, AWS built UltraWarm, which gives Elasticsearch customers a warm storage tier that both stores large amounts of data cost-effectively, and provides the type of snappy, interactive experience that Elasticsearch customers expect. Now Amazon Elasticsearch Service supports two storage tiers, hot and UltraWarm. The hot tier is used for indexing, updating, and providing the fastest access to data. UltraWarm provides a distributed cache for more frequently accessed data, while using advanced placement techniques to determine the blocks of data that are accessed less frequently, and can be moved outside of the cache to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). UltraWarm stores data in Amazon S3, providing up to 50% faster query execution versus competing warm-tier solutions, and 80% lower cost than the warm-tier storage from other managed Elasticsearch offerings. With UltraWarm, customers can manage current and historical log data for interactive operational analysis and visualization in a single cluster. UltraWarm is a seamless extension of the Amazon Elasticsearch Service. Customers can easily visualize search results across both their recent and longer-term operational data, all from their Kibana interface. Additionally, UltraWarm supports all of the Elasticsearch Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), tools, and features, including enterprise-grade security with fine-grained access control, encryption at rest and in flight, integrated alerting, SQL querying, and more. This allows developers, DevOps engineers, and InfoSec experts to use Amazon Elasticsearch Service for the analysis of recent (weeks) and longer-term (months or years) operational data without needing to spend days restoring data from archives (Amazon S3 or Amazon Glacier) to an active searchable state in an Elasticsearch cluster. "Our customers tell us that log data offers a wealth of operational and security insights, but that the storage of log data quickly adds up, and proves cost-prohibitive over the medium and long term," said Raju Gulabani, VP of Databases and Analytics, AWS. "UltraWarm is the most cost-effective Elasticsearch-compatible storage solution available. It is also performance-optimized, so customers can investigate and interactively visualize their data while they embrace data at scale." UltraWarm can be enabled on existing or new domains using the AWS Management console, CLI, or SDK. UltraWarm is available today on Amazon Elasticsearch version 6.8 and above in US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon, N. California), AWS GovCloud (US-Gov-East, US-Gov-West), Canada (Central), South America (Sao Paulo), EU (Ireland, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul, Mumbai, Hong Kong), China (Beijing, Ningxia), and Middle East (Bahrain), with additional regions coming soon. Sophos is a worldwide leader in next-generation cybersecurity, protecting organizations of all sizes in more than 150 countries from today's most advanced cyber threats. "Sophos uses Amazon Elasticsearch Service to run a large-scale security monitoring and alerting system, because it is highly performant and scalable," said Prakash Talreja, Architect, Sophos. "We are excited that UltraWarm will enable us to retain log data for much longer in a cost-effective way. We see great value in leveraging UltraWarm to bring down cost and reduce operational overhead." Asurion is a leading provider of device insurance, warranty, and support services for cell phones, consumer electronics, and home appliances. "All our application and infrastructure logs are loaded into Amazon Elasticsearch Service for real-time data analysis, API performance metrics, and alerting based on log events," said Shyam Rayaprolu, Principal Architect, Retail and SBX Platforms, Asurion. "We are always looking to bring costs down. Even though we automated our data backup process operationally, it has become overhead for our DevOps and Support teams. We are really excited that UltraWarm removes the operational overhead, and reduces cost significantly. We were able to easily migrate our data from the hot nodes to UltraWarm nodes, and use our existing Kibana dashboards, without the need to make any changes." SparkPost is the world's first and only predictive email intelligence platform, helping brands predict and optimize email performance with data analytics solutions. "Amazon Elasticsearch Service powers one of our most used features – Event Search – which indexes billions of email message and engagement events in real-time every day. Our customers can quickly resolve support issues by easily looking up the delivery and open status for an email sent to a particular recipient," says Chris McFadden, VP of Engineering, SparkPost. "We love the simplicity and performance of Amazon Elasticsearch Service and are excited to use UltraWarm to further reduce our operational costs, while simultaneously offering our customers access to raw event data beyond our current ten day retention period. We believe offering up to 30 days of data will make our Event Search feature even more valuable as a go-to troubleshooting tool for our customers." About Amazon Web Services For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 76 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for nine more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, and Spain. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews. |
| Travel Isn’t the Ticket for Amazon’s Cloud - The Wall Street Journal Posted: 02 May 2020 07:34 AM PDT  Amazon.com's cloud operation has grown quickly to become one of the largest software businesses in the world. That also means there are lots of ways it can get hurt. Hurt, of course, is a relative term. Amazon's web-services business, known formally as AWS, generated $10.2 billion in revenue for the first quarter—up 33% from the same period last year. That is a growth rate well above what any other software business of its size is managing. Oracle reported $9.8 billion in revenue for its most recent quarter that ended in... |
| Posted: 04 May 2020 10:23 AM PDT  Tim Bray, a vice president and "distinguished engineer" at Amazon Web Services, has quit his job with the cloud provider due to Amazon.com's alleged handling of whistle-blowers complaining about warehouse safety conditions amid the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. "May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun," Bray wrote in a post on his blog. "I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistle-blowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19. What with big-tech salaries and share vestings, this will probably cost me over a million (pre-tax) dollars, not to mention the best job I've ever had, working with awfully good people. So I'm pretty blue." Bray (pictured above) said he "snapped" following the reported firings of two Amazon Employees for Climate Justice workers -- Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa – who had promoted a petition demanding Amazon coronavirus protections and organized a video call with outside activist Naomi Klein and Amazon warehouse workers after the online retail giant fired another worker who had been conducting organizing efforts for better safety conditions, according to his blog post. "The justifications were laughable; it was clear to any reasonable observer that they were turfed for whistle-blowing," Bray wrote in his blog. "Management could have objected to the event, or demanded that outsiders be excluded, or that leadership be represented, or any number of other things; there was plenty of time. Instead, they just fired the activists. At that point I snapped." Acknowledging that vice presidents "shouldn't go publicly rogue," Bray said he raised his concerns through the proper Amazon channels "by the book." "I'm not at liberty to disclose those discussions, but I made many of the arguments appearing in this essay," Bray said. "I think I made them to the appropriate people. That done, remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned." Bray didn't immediately respond to a CRN inquiry for additional comment. AWS declined to comment on Bray's post and his departure. Amazon, meanwhile, said it expects to invest approximately $4 billion from April to June on COVID-related initiatives, including more than $800 million on safety measures. Among actions the company said it's taken to date are 150 "process updates" including enhanced cleaning, social distancing measures and disinfectant spraying at its facilities; distributing personal protective gear including masks to employees; conducting temperature checks at its facilities; giving an additional up to two weeks paid time off for employees diagnosed with the coronavirus; increased pay; and the establishment of a $25 million relief fund for partners such as delivery drivers and seasonal associates. The company also has said its building scalable coronavirus testing for workers. Bray worked with AWS' serverless group at its Vancouver, Canada, office. His discontent with Amazon apparently reached further back to the company's response last year to Amazon Employees for Climate Justice workers' promotion of a shareholders' resolution calling for Amazon to lead action on climate issues and the company allegedly threatening to fire those leaders. Referring to Amazon's reported coronavirus-related firings, Bray offered these descriptive phrases to describe them: "chickenshit," "kill the messenger," "never heard of the Streisand effect," "designed to create a climate of fear" and "like painting a sign on your forehead saying 'either guilty, or has something to hide.'" "On the other hand, Amazon's messaging has been urgent that they are prioritizing this issue and putting massive efforts into warehouse safety," Bray said. "I actually believe this: I have heard detailed descriptions from people I trust of the intense work and huge investments. Good for them; and let's grant that you don't turn a supertanker on a dime. But I believe the worker testimony, too. And at the end of the day, the big problem isn't the specifics of Covid-19 response. It's that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential. Only that's not just Amazon, it's how 21st-century capitalism is done." While Amazon is "exceptionally well-managed and has demonstrated great skill at spotting opportunities and building repeatable processes for exploiting them," Bray said "it has a corresponding lack of vision about the human costs of the relentless growth and accumulation of wealth and power." "If we don't like certain things Amazon is doing, we need to put legal guardrails in place to stop those things," Bray said. "We don't need to invent anything new; a combination of antitrust and living-wage and worker-empowerment legislation, rigorously enforced, offers a clear path forward." Firing whistle-blowers is "evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture," Bray alleged. "I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison," he said. But Bray had kinder words for how workers are treated at AWS, calling it a "different story." "It treats its workers humanely, strives for work/life balance, struggles to move the diversity needle (and mostly fails, but so does everyone else), and is by and large an ethical organization," Bray said. "I genuinely admire its leadership. Of course, its workers have power. The average pay is very high, and anyone who's unhappy can walk across the street and get another job paying the same or better." "At the end of the day, it's all about power balances," Bray continued. "The warehouse workers are weak and getting weaker, what with mass unemployment and (in the US) job-linked health insurance. So they're gonna (SIC) get treated like crap, because capitalism. Any plausible solution has to start with increasing their collective strength." Bray previously worked as a developer advocate at Google and director of web technology for the former Sun Microsystems and was a co-author of the original XML specification. He said he didn't know what his future plans will be. "I don't know, genuinely haven't taken time to think about it," he said. "I'm sad, but I'm breathing more freely." |
| Here's How Coronavirus Will Impact Amazon's Profit Growth - The Motley Fool Posted: 05 May 2020 09:47 AM PDT Few companies have benefited from the coronavirus crisis as much as Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN). Online retail demand has surged during the pandemic as non-essential stores have been closed and consumers have been reluctant to shop in supermarkets. Meanwhile, the transition to a stay-at-home economy has led to a burst in consumption of digital services like streaming, and that shift has also benefited its cloud-computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), in a number of ways. Even Amazon's advertising business seems to holding up relatively well -- shoppers come to Amazon's e-commerce portal to search for basic items, rather than things like travel and auto, which have been severely impacted by the pandemic.  Image source: Amazon Therefore it wasn't a surprise to see Amazon's sales surge in its first-quarter earnings report. Overall revenue rose 26.4%, its fastest clip since sales spiked following the company's 2017 acquisition of Whole Foods. In its North America segment, revenue jumped 28.8%, its best performance in at least six quarters, and sales growth in physical stores -- made up almost entirely of Whole Foods -- accelerated to 8%, its fastest clip ever. Online sales growth was also the fastest in at least six quarters at 25%. However, additional costs to handle the crush of orders in March weighed on profits. Amazon's gross margin, which accounts for expenses like products, shipping, and digital media, fell from 43.2% to 41.3%, while fulfillment costs rose 34.1% in the quarter to make up 15.3% of revenue, up from 14.4% in the year-ago quarter. Shipping costs also spiked 49% to $10.9 billion. On the earnings call, CFO Brian Olsavsky explained the COVID-related impact to the business by saying, "While customer demand remains high, the incremental revenue we are seeing on many of the lower ASP (average selling price) essential products is basically coming at cost." In other words, the spike in demand has been for low-margin products like food, cleaning supplies, and medicine, while sales of higher-margin goods like apparel, shoes, and wireless products fell. The company spent more than $600 million in COVID-related costs, and that, combined with the shift in demand, caused overall operating profit to fall from $4.4 billion to $4 billion. However, the impact in the e-commerce business was much more significant. In the North America segment, operating profit fell $2.3 billion to $1.3 billion, while its international operating loss expanded from $90 million to $398 million in the quarter. An increase in profits at AWS helped make up for that shortfall. A potential for new businessAmazon stunned the market in its earnings report by saying that it would spend an incremental $4 billion on COVID-related expenses in the second quarter, essentially wiping out its profit for the period. Among those expenses were higher wages and bonuses for warehouse employees, inefficiencies related to social distancing policies in its warehouse, personal protective equipment, and $300 million to build a lab to produce tests for the coronavirus that it could use on its employees. The testing lab, the most curious of the additional expenses, is a first-of-its-kind project for Amazon, and typical of the company's mission to invent and experiment. CEO Jeff Bezos acknowledged that it may not yield significant results, saying in his annual shareholder letter, "We're not sure how far we will get in the relevant timeframe, but we think it's worth trying, and we stand ready to share anything we learn." In response to a question on the call about testing evolving into a new line of business, Olsavsky said, "Our main concern is getting testing in the hands of our employees and then potentially as we have excess capacity, perhaps we can help in other areas." CEO Jeff Bezos also alluded to potential new lines of business in the press release, saying, "Providing for customers and protecting employees as this crisis continues for more months is going to take skill, humility, invention, and money. If you're a shareowner in Amazon, you may want to take a seat, because we're not thinking small." Despite the impact on its bottom line, Amazon may also be looking at the pandemic as a long-term opportunity, especially in an area like healthcare, where it has been gradually building a position in recent years with its acquisition of online pharmacy Pillpack, the launch of its pilot healthcare service Amazon Care, and its Haven joint venture with JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway. Why costs will remain elevated beyond Q2Many of the COVID-related costs that Amazon is undertaking in the second quarter are for continuing needs and processes that aren't going to go away until the pandemic ends. Social distancing in its warehouses, for example, and the need to purchase and use personal protective equipment will continue as long as the virus is a threat. Similarly, the testing lab Amazon is building now will continue to run for the duration of the crisis. Though the company intends for its higher wages and bonuses to expire later this month, it may prove difficult to end them, especially in an environment where front-line workers run a higher risk of contracting the virus. Amazon has already been the subject of protests and walkouts, and such a backlash could intensify if it removes the additional compensation. A vice president at the company just resigned to protest the terminations of several activist insiders. For investors, the company continues to position itself well for long-term growth, and it will gain an advantage from the impact of the pandemic on its brick-and-mortar rivals as e-commerce's share of overall retail sales will accelerate during the crisis. However, it's clear that the top-line growth will not lead to bottom-line profit while the virus is a concern, and that means that the recent surge that took Amazon stock to all-time highs likely won't be repeated in the foreseeable future. Though the tech giant will almost certainly emerge from the crisis in a stronger competitive position, the profit headwinds in the interim will keep a ceiling on the stock. |
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