Posted on 02/25/2022 4:52:24 AM PST by Kaslin
One of Amazon’s guiding leadership principles is to “earn trust.” If Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers took that motto to heart, they would be searching for a new cloud provider.
Between its continued security breaches and its sleazy practice of locking customers into exorbitant bills, all that AWS has earned is the expectation that it will cost its clients dearly in both data and dollars.
Last month, a cloud security company uncovered two critical vulnerabilities in AWS’s system that went undetected by the cloud provider. These vulnerabilities placed AWS customers at serious risk for a dangerously long period of time.
One bug in AWS’s “Glue” data integration service permitted prospective attackers to “access data of other AWS Glue customers.” An attacker could have also leveraged a second identified bug to gain “privileged access to any resource in AWS” or “leak sensitive files.”
These critical vulnerabilities could have left organizations with proprietary information exposed to the world. AWS customers are lucky that a sophisticated hacker didn’t exploit their cloud’s lax security and cause a crisis.
AWS has also earned mistrust with its shady business practices. Foremost among them is the company’s “notorious” habit of locking customers into their service by threatening excessive fees for moving customer data.
AWS holds up customers with an egress fee that is levied when a customer wants to move data to a different platform. While AWS is happy to upload data for free, customers are often confronted “with the shock of seeing how much it costs to get it back out”. As one market analyst put it, it can feel like “they twist the knife and they rub salt” when trying to reclaim data.
For customers with a limited budget, it means being locked into AWS’s costly terms. For customers who are determined to power through AWS’s lock-in, they can expect to fork over millions. In 2018, for example, Netflix paid AWS nearly $20 million just to move its data.
Many clients have found themselves paying AWS more and more as costs pile up. Internal AWS sales figures show that in 2018, Pinterest’s data transfer bill increased 78 percent from the prior year, Airbnb’s rose 163 percent, Capital One’s grew 181 percent, and Snap’s shot up 588 percent.
Even a former Amazon official, who spent nine years as AWS’s global marketing chief, called the company’s egress fees “a customer-hostile pricing strategy” that’s designed “to lock you in and make it really hard to get out.”
These customer-hostile policies, which have helped it become the largest cloud-computing provider in the U.S, made AWS a leading subject in the House Antitrust Subcommittee’s recent investigation of Big Tech. The subcommittee report identified customers who said they view AWS’s fees “less as a cost for Amazon to transport data and more as friction imposed by Amazon for switching providers.”
The subcommittee report captured the growing discontent among AWS clients and the “pressure to rethink their billing model” that “has long been a frustration for customers.”
Thanks to AWS’s cloud trap, many clients conclude that moving data “would be difficult to implement and would cause us to incur significant time and expense and could disrupt or degrade our ability to deliver our products and services.” That’s how one AWS customer put it to congressional investigators.
Egress fees are just one of many ways AWS and other Big Tech giants secure market power while undermining openness, competition, and innovation.
AWS has cemented its reputation for threatening egregious charges in the hopes that it keeps its customers locked down against their will. It may not be trust, but it is one thing AWS has earned.
“Let’s put everything in the Cloud!...What could go wrong?”
there was also the day-long failure of AWS’s US-EAST1 region, about a month ago, which caused massive outages in various services. That outage was never explained and the press, being both ignorant and subservient, didn’t bother to press AWS for a solid explanation.
You are correct
I have to say off the record that the compensation Amazon gets, or gives, to partners is a two-way street. I will email you off line.
I am open to suggestions as to how to avoid the cloud altogether. Having started with MS products in the mid 90’s (Windows 3.1) and indulging upgrades to the present day, the experience has shifted to “pay as you go” with pushes toward the cloud. I’ve about had it. Need a system self contained at home with minimal internet use.
The Data Hotel, you can check in, but never check out.
AWS is not the only game in town for cloud.
AWS in general is nowhere near as reliable as they would have you believe. Quite a bit cheaper than doing stuff in your own datacenter, if you assume the downtime risk is comparable.
Linux desktop & OpenOffice/LibreOffice. Microsoft wants everything to be a subscription to maximize their continuing revenue stream.
To paraphrase others - Linux Mint: the ultimate Windows service pack.
“Earn trust” does note equate to “deserve trust”.
I prefer to keep my data on a hard drive with backups to flash drives often.
The new laptops come with solid-state drives. Since I’ve had flash drives fail I’m hesitant to buy a new PC.
I suggest a nice linux box running a Windows VM for some normal interaction with the Internet.
It’s a cloud.
No, it’s money going up in smoke.
That's what many companies know but getting off AWS is the trick as it is expensive as the article states. Only other cloud that I have interacted with was Oracle which was not really ready for prime-time from the experiences I had with it.
Microsoft’s Azure is nipping on the heels of AWS.
My experience with AWS engineers has been lackluster. Their marching orders are to get in, get the customer on their products, and get out. There’s no training or at-the-elbow support to understand customer’s needs or organization. It’s all about getting them on the product to enable them to start billing for use and charging them exorbitant fees for after-the-fact support.
I wished I still had my old computer, but it went on the fritz. This pos that I have is a crap and the keyboard is also a crap. Unfortunately I can not afford a new pc and keybord
Linux... Seriously. It will give your computer back to you as the owner.
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