AWS cloud growing three times as fast as dot-comming Amazon Retailing giant Amazon runs AWS as a subsidiary at arm's length and in a somewhat stealthy manner at that. Having AWS be a little removed from Amazon is necessary because Amazon often competes with some of the companies that want to host applications on its cloud, and the stealth is just a way for AWS to preserve some mystique …
I'm old enough to remember when the butcher was skilled labor, and working up front in grocery was just enough to raise a family. You're screwed when businesses start talking about your job in terms of "consolidation" and "margin" like this.
Your employer will get hooked on Amazon's prices just like you got hooked on Walmart's prices. The last person to earn a middle-class wage doing IT work is already walking the earth. These jobs are already fading away like textile, steel, and automotive did.
That's the difference between "IT" - which covers exciting stuff like making sure the printers are full of toner, swapping backup tapes, resetting forgotten passwords: the stuff that gets automated away to nothing anyway as time goes on - and the actual computing industry. S3 stops me needing to run fsck or configure RAID arrays: it means when I write and deploy a web application I don't need to think about configuring storage hardware, it certainly doesn't replace the need to write the software in the first place!
Any job where the main requirement appears to be possession of opposable thumbs is likely to go that way, if it hasn't already, whether it's slicing up dead animal or sticking plastic packages in slots on electronic devices: if people to do the job cost much more than minimum wage, the job would be automated away entirely! Writing software, designing circuits or chips? That's another kettle of fish entirely (OK, there's software out there clearly written by people whose only qualification for the job was having digits to operate a keyboard with, but I like to think Darwin will take care of them eventually...)
I'm with James on this one - Amazon isn't any threat to my IT-industry job, now or any time in the future unless they make radical changes to their business model. But then my job isn't plugging boxes into racks.
I'll also note that I live equal distance from a Walmart and a thriving independent butcher shop. I patronize the latter frequently and the former never, because price isn't my sole criterion, and it clearly isn't for many of my neighbors (many of whom have very limited budgets) either.
Of course, around here, the automobile industry is doing pretty well too.
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$1200 to store a 1 TB for a year, is that very cheap? That sounds more like very expensive.
It's a question of TCO, not basic cost. For some people, storing the data and having automatic backups and having access to it anywhere there's an Internet connection and not having to employ staff to maintain hardware does make it worth the cost. I back my personal stuff up to S3 because the cost to me is negligible compared to the value of the time I'd spend setting up and maintaining something equivalent.
If I were running a company with an IT staff, it's likely S3 wouldn't be a sensible choice for corporate data. Different environments, different use cases, different values.
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