Facebook is the Amazon AWS Killer

AWS is now an $8Bn business for Amazon. Could anyone have predicted that in 1997 or even 2007? This week I was talking to a few people about who might be able to disrupt AWS. It won’t be easy. We immediately discounted the old guys like HP, IBM, Dell etc and even Google seems to be a complete also-ran in IaaS. Microsoft Azure might have potential.

PaaS is separate as it’s higher up the stack and makes use of IaaS. I expect Open Source PaaS like OpenShift 3 to grow very quickly in the coming years as it makes deployment and management of Apps incredibly easy. Where PaaS might hurt AWS is in abstracting what IaaS you are using, so as long as the feature set is there, you don’t care where your Apps are running (apart from Geo lag and data protection laws).

One of the people I talked to thinks that AWS will be slayed by a startup who may not even exist yet. He also felt that smart VPSes like DigitalOcean might do it. I’m a huge fan of DO and gained enormous reliability and speed by switching to it from Google Compute Engine/CloudSQL whilst reducing my bill by 2/3rds. But it still feels like an SME/SMB or individual developer solution.

So I’m predicting it’ll be Facebook. Why? Think about the following:

The big open question is how they do their virtualisation and containerisation. If they have that nailed, then I think they might go for it.

Let’s re-visit this post in 5 years.

Conor O'Neill

Tech guy who likes running slowly

Bandon, Cork, Ireland https://conoroneill.net