Backblaze challenges AWS by making its cloud storage S3 compatible - TechCrunch |
- Backblaze challenges AWS by making its cloud storage S3 compatible - TechCrunch
- Top AWS engineer Tim Bray quits $1m-plus job over Amazon firing employees - ZDNet
- Cloud lift: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple and others find a common cushion in the crisis - GeekWire
- Amazon: Huge AWS Growth Potential, Could Be Worth $4,900 By 2024 - Seeking Alpha
| Backblaze challenges AWS by making its cloud storage S3 compatible - TechCrunch Posted: 04 May 2020 09:08 AM PDT Backblaze today announced that its B2 Cloud Storage service is now API-compatible with Amazon's S3 storage service. Backblaze started as an affordable cloud backup service, but over the last few years, the company has also taken its storage expertise and launched the developer-centric B2 Cloud Storage service, which promises to be significantly cheaper than similar offerings from the large cloud vendors. Pricing for B2 starts at $0.005 per GB/month. AWS S3 starts at $0.023 per GB/month. The storage price alone isn't going to make developers switch providers, though. There are some costs involved in supporting multiple heterogeneous systems, too. By making B2 compatible with the S3 API, developers can now simply redirect their storage to Backblaze without the need for any extensive rewrites. "For years, businesses have loved our astonishingly easy-to-use cloud storage for supporting
Current B2 customers include the likes of American Public Television, Patagonia and Verizon's Complex Networks (with Verizon being the corporate overlords of Verizon Media Group, TechCrunch's parent company). Backblaze says it has about 100,000 total customers for its B2 service. Among the launch partners for today's launch are Cinafilm, IBM's Aspera file transfer and streaming service, storage specialist Quantum and cloud data management service Veeam. "Public cloud storage has become an integral part of the post-production process. This latest enhancement makes Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage more accessible — both for us as a vendor, and for customers," said Eric Bassier, senior director, Product Marketing at Quantum. "We can now use the new S3 Compatible APIs to add BackBlaze B2 to the list of StorNext compatible public cloud storage targets, taking another step toward enabling hybrid and multi-cloud workflows." |
| Top AWS engineer Tim Bray quits $1m-plus job over Amazon firing employees - ZDNet Posted: 04 May 2020 06:12 AM PDT Tim Bray, a VP and distinguished engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS), has quit his $1m-plus a year role at the cloud giant over Amazon firing a group of employees who publicly protested conditions at Amazon warehouses during the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic. Bray joined AWS at the end of 2014, following a four-year stint at Google as its Android developer advocate. Before that, he was the director of web technology at Sun Microsystems, where he played a key role in the development of Java and its open-sourcing under GPL. He left Sun a month after Oracle completed its acquisition, which of course gave Oracle Java and the ammunition to launch its decade-long legal battle with Google over how the search company used Java in Android. Bray has previously praised the culture at AWS, saying in a 2017 blogpost: "I don't really need the money, but I haven't quit." He still admires AWS and its leadership, but handed in his resignation May 1, a few weeks after Amazon fired several US employees who'd publicly raised concerns about worker safety and lack of testing at its distribution warehouses. "May 1 was my last day as a VP and distinguished engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of COVID-19," he wrote on his personal blog. Amazon was in the headlines in January for allegedly threatening to fire climate activists working at the company. Then in April, amid the coronavirus outbreak in the US, the Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, reported that Amazon had fired several employees who were in the group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ) and who had called for safer working conditions and more protections while working at its warehouses. Bray notes that he was one the 8,702 signatories to the AECJ's open letter calling on shareholders to support a resolution for Amazon to take action on climate. He says the "point I snapped" was when Amazon in mid-April fired two AECJ leaders, Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, immediately after they'd helped internally promote a petition demanding coronavirus protections for warehouse workers. The pair had also organized a video call for April 16 featuring Amazon warehouse workers from around the world and prominent social activist Naomi Klein. "The justifications were laughable; it was clear to any reasonable observer that they were turfed for whistleblowing," he writes. "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." Bray says he escalated his concerns through the proper channels because a VP shouldn't go publicly rogue. He doesn't disclose discussions he had but says he made many of the same arguments detailed in his blogpost. "Remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned." However, Bray also notes that he believes Amazon has been "prioritizing this issue and putting massive efforts into warehouse safety". But he also argues that Amazon firing employees who complained is symptomatic of modern capitalism. "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," writes Bray. For that reason, Bray also argues that regulators need to impose rules on Amazon. "Amazon is exceptionally well managed and has demonstrated great skill at spotting opportunities and building repeatable processes for exploiting them. It has a corresponding lack of vision about the human costs of the relentless growth and accumulation of wealth and power," he writes. "If we don't like certain things Amazon is doing, we need to put legal guardrails in place to stop those things. 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." He makes a distinction between Amazon and the way it treats warehouse workers and AWS, which employs well-paid tech workers. AWS "is a different story", he writes, and "treats workers humanly, 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." "I genuinely admire [AWS's] leadership," he says. "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." Amazon declined to comment on Bray's resignation.  Tim Bray: "Remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned." Image: AWS/YouTube |
| Posted: 04 May 2020 08:28 AM PDT  Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is advising the company's shareholders to "take a seat" to prepare for the tech giant's ambitious spending on COVID-19 initiatives, but if not for Amazon Web Services, they might be falling out of their chairs. The tech giant's cloud division was responsible for more than 77% of Amazon's total operating profits in the first quarter, the highest percentage in two years. Amazon's total operating profit declined 10% to $4 billion as reported, but without AWS, operating profits for the company would have been below $1 billion.  And those cloud profits are a big reason Amazon has the financial license to spend what Bezos says could be an additional $4 billion coping with the crisis in the current quarter. Amazon's situation is unique in many ways, but its reliance on the cloud for profits during the pandemic reflects a common pattern for tech companies. Results reported last week from Apple, Microsoft and Google show they also benefited, to varying degrees, from their efforts to expand beyond their traditional businesses and further into cloud infrastructure and subscription services in recent years.
Beyond those giants, other tech companies also saw the benefits of business diversification. Seattle-based networking and security technology company F5 Networks, for example, has expanded beyond its traditional hardware appliances to build a growing software and services business. As a result, 65% of its $583.5 million in quarterly revenue was from recurring contracts. "In the last three years, in particular, we have built a very strong base of recurring revenues," said François Locoh-Donou, F5's president and CEO, in an interview with GeekWire. "In times like this, recurring revenues are more sticky, because you're asking customers to renew something, not to buy new projects, etc. And I think because of that, we've got a lot of resilience." That's one reason F5 is in a position to pledge to avoid layoffs from COVID-19 for the remainder of its fiscal year. Oracle is also seeing the benefits of its cloud expansion, announcing last week that Zoom has chosen its cloud infrastructure to help support a spike in usage. Responding to an inquiry from GeekWire, a Zoom spokesperson said the company continues to use Microsoft Azure and AWS.  But how long will the cloud be this cushy? For all of these companies, a big wild card is the pandemic's impact on longer-term business spending on technology projects. "A surge in demand for online collaboration tools, ecommerce and consumer cloud services drove sharp increases in cloud infrastructure consumption, benefiting all the major cloud providers," research firm Canalys explains in a new report, showing overall spending on cloud infrastructure services growing 34% to $31 billion in the quarter. "But this was offset by a slowdown in large complex enterprise migrations and transformational cloud projects as businesses called a halt to all but the most important IT tasks as lockdowns took effect." This could get costly. The major cloud providers are spending on new capital projects to boost capacity, in part to support remote work and emergency services during the pandemic. Amazon's official financial guidance for the June quarter illustrates the uncertainty ahead — ranging anywhere from a $1.5 billion operating profit to a $1.5 billion operating loss. |
| Amazon: Huge AWS Growth Potential, Could Be Worth $4,900 By 2024 - Seeking Alpha Posted: 03 May 2020 09:09 PM PDT [unable to retrieve full-text content]Amazon: Huge AWS Growth Potential, Could Be Worth $4,900 By 2024 Seeking Alpha |
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