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The Unbelievable Power of Amazon's Cloud

Amazon Web Services

https://aws.amazon.com/

More on AWS

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http://docs.aws.amazon.com/gettingstarted/latest/awsgsg-intro/gsg-aws-tutorials.html

The company's Web Services—which undergird Netflix, Healthcare.gov, and Spotify—might be the single most important piece of technology to the modern tech boom.

Jeff Bezos speaks at a press conference in New York in 2011. Shannon Stapleton / Reuters

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  Robinson Meyer
  
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  Apr 23, 2015
  
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  Technology
  

On Thursday, we’ll finally get a sense of the true scope of one of the most important businesses for the Internet.

Amazon is due to announce the size of its Web Services product. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a set of cloud services often used by startups, big companies, and government agencies. You might know AWS better as “the servers that run Netflix and Instagram.”

AWS lets companies buy powerful computers cheaply and whenever they need them to handle traffic, to store video, to power a database. It’s not an understatement to say that AWS is the piece of infrastructure that has enabled the current tech boom. The only single technology which might come close to it is the smartphone.

Why?  The 2010s tech industry is built on quickly scaling a product to as many users as possible. It’s based, on other words, on fast growth. AWS and its competitors are what permit that fast growth. They have taken the normally considerable equipment costs—of servers, cables, hard drives, and power supplies—and abstracted them away. Entrepreneurs and coders can think about and purchase computing power on an as-needed basis, while the physical data centers they’re actually using sit far away in Virginia or Oregon.

Since its launch nine years ago, when it was the first such cloud service, AWS has come to dominate the market. But this is the first time Amazon will report AWS’s size. (Previously it reported AWS revenue and profit as part the rest of the company’s business in North America. In 2014, that segment claimed revenue of $5.4 billion.)

You can catch glimpses of the vastness of AWS, but it’s hard to get a sense of the true importance of the service. What’s enchanting about AWS is what’s enchanting about the cloud: It works in the background, silent, invisible, and powerful, never announcing itself—until Vine, Instagram, and Airbnb all go down at once.

So while we wait to learn just how much money AWS makes, here’s an incomplete (yet still mind-boggling) list of technological, social, economic, and cultural infrastructure powered by Amazon’s quiet goliath.

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  AWS provides the guts that lets Netflix stream billions of hours of movies and TV shows, so both the modern habit of unplanned binge-watching and the aversion to network TV shows is made possible by the service.
  
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  AWS is what kept Paper Mag’s servers from not breaking when it (and Kim Kardashian) broke the Internet.
  
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  When Healthcare.gov was being revamped, parts of the website were moved to AWS.
  
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  Spotify hosts its music on the company’s cloud storage service, S3. The ability to listen to any album, whenever, at work or home—AWS permits that.
  
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  Even the police body camera debate turns on AWS. Taser’s hosted service for body-cam footage and other kinds of digital evidence, Evidence.com, is actually a shell built on AWS.
  
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  And finally: Last year, the CIA moved much of its computing power to a custom AWS setup.
  

Though the information Amazon releases Thursday will offer a clearer picture of just how integral its cloud services are to the Internet as a whole, those same services will likely keep growing. As the Wall Street Journal has pointed out, Amazon says that it now adds computing power on a daily basis that’s equivalent to its entire capacity just 10 years ago.

Apple Puts $1 Billion in Didi, a Rival to Uber in China

点击查看本文中文版 Read in Chinese

By MIKE ISAAC and VINDU GOELMAY 12, 2016

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple invested $1 billion in Didi Chuxing, China’s biggest ride-hailing service, moving for the first time into on-demand transportation in one of the largest-ever strategic investments by the iPhone maker.

The move is highly unusual for Apple, which has generally been quiet when it comes to deal making.

While the company, based in Cupertino, Calif., has bought technology start-ups here and there, its last big investment was the acquisition of Beats, a headphone maker and music service, for $3 billion in 2014.

At the time, the Beats deal was also regarded as a departure for Apple.

Apple’s move into a Chinese company is also notable. Apple is attempting to reinvigorate flagging iPhone sales in China, the company’s second-largest market, and just last month Apple shuttered its iBooks and iTunes movie stores in the country.

“Didi exemplifies the innovation taking place in the iOS developer community in China,” Tim Cook, chief executive of Apple, said in a statement. “We are extremely impressed by the business they’ve built and their excellent leadership team, and we look forward to supporting them as they grow.”

Apple’s sales have encountered a sharp slowdown in China. The company reported sales of $12.5 billion in Greater China, which includes China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, in its most recent fiscal quarter. That was down 26 percent from the previous year.

It had an operating profit of $4.8 billion from the region in the quarter, down 28 percent from the previous year.

Apple has been working on its own secret car project, which one independent analyst, Neil Cybart, said on Wednesday had accounted for much of the billions of dollars in research and development spending by the company.

Apple certainly has the money to spare. As of March 26, the company said it had nearly $233 billion in cash and marketable securities.

An Apple spokeswoman referred back to Mr. Cook’s statement and did not add anything further. Uber declined to comment.

“The first time we met with Mr. Cook, we shared with him a joke,” said Jean Liu, Didi’s president, in a conference call with reporters on Thursday evening. “Our company’s legal name is called little orange. We figured a company named after a fruit could always achieve something big.”

Four years old, Didi Chuxing is China’s pre-eminent ride-hailing service and a major competitor to Uber, an American company that is spending millions to make inroads into the Chinese market.

Didi serves close to 300 million users across more than 400 Chinese cities, according to the company.

“The endorsement from Apple is an enormous encouragement and inspiration for our four-year-old company,” Cheng Wei, founder and chief executive of Didi, said in a statement.

“Didi will work hard with our drivers, riders and global partners, to make available to every citizen flexible and reliable mobility choices, and help cities solve transportation, environmental and employment challenges.”

NYT