By Robert McMillan
For nearly a decade, Amazon Web Services, the giant retailer's
cloud computing division, has told prospective customers: Ditch
your data center and trust us to run your applications, store your
data and host your internal software development.
Yet Amazon.com Inc. itself doesn't fully run in the cloud.
Amazon isn't alone. The other top cloud providers-- Google Inc.,
Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines Corp.--use
their own cloud services for some purposes, but they continue to
keep certain functions on private servers. Their struggles are a
microcosm of the issues that dog their customers: Worries about
reliability, security and risks inherent with change that have made
it hard to move critical computing tasks to the public cloud.
"The vast majority of Amazon.com runs on AWS," a company
spokesperson said, and it intends to run everything there
eventually.
The fact that Amazon still uses private servers is "ironic,"
said Ed Anderson, an analyst with Gartner, which advises customers
on both cloud services and data center servers. "That's exactly why
we tell people evaluating cloud services, 'Do not buy into the
hype. Do not buy into the myths. You have to be pragmatic, just
like these vendors are,'" he said.
These cloud kingpins sell metered computing power on demand, a
sector of cloud computing known as infrastructure as a service.
This market, combined with some other cloud services, has grown
from $10.5 billion in 2013 to $19.9 billion this year, according to
the research firm International Data Corp. It is projected to be
worth to $26.5 billion in 2016. They promise their customers to
save money and simplify life with better security and reliability
than the average corporate information technology department can
manage.
Amazon Web Services leads the pack with a 29% share of the
market and is on track to bring in more than $6 billion this
year--roughly a third of the sector's total revenue--by IDC's
tally. But that leadership doesn't come cheaply. Every day, the
service adds as much computing capacity as all of Amazon needed in
2004, the company has said. Meanwhile, it has cut prices and added
services at a furious pace to fend off competition from Google,
IBM, Microsoft and others.
Amazon began transitioning its own operations to AWS about four
years after the service launched in 2006, according to Colin
Bodell, who worked on the project when he was an executive there.
"Internally, everything new is built upon AWS," said Mr. Bodell,
now the chief technology officer of Time Inc. However, Mr. Bodell,
who left Amazon in 2014, said the company ran back-end databases
containing confidential data on servers that weren't part of AWS.
An Amazon spokesperson said declined to comment on where it stores
its databases.
Over the past five years, Google has shifted hundreds of
internal apps to its Google Cloud Platform, including programs that
store internal technology support documents and manage software
licenses. But the company's flagship search engine runs on private
servers, according to Ben Fried, Google's chief information
officer. The same goes for YouTube and Gmail.
"Although these applications run on the same infrastructure,
network, storage, systems and services that underpin Google Cloud
Platform, we've spent many years optimizing them as currently built
and do not yet have a defined path to move them over to Cloud
Platform," Mr. Fried said via email.
Microsoft is just starting to move its public-facing services to
its Azure cloud. Parts of Skype, Office365, OneDrive and networked
versions of videogames including "Titanfall" run on the system,
said Jason Zander, corporate vice president of Azure. He expects
the number of Microsoft products on Azure to grow. Microsoft also
uses Azure for its information technology support systems and
product development.
"I've got teams internally that are very excited to move onto
these systems," said Mr. Zander.
Amazon and Google promote cloud computing as a shared resource,
but Microsoft and IBM help customers set up private clouds within
their own data centers. IBM runs a number of its operations on its
public SoftLayer cloud, including Bluemix, Watson Analytics and IBM
Verse email. But according to John Kelly, the company's top-ranked
technology officer, some computing tasks will always remain
private. "For IBM, the end state will be hybrid," he said.
The cloud providers' own cautious embrace of cloud computing is
becoming more wholehearted, according to Grady Summers, senior vice
president of cloud analytics at FireEye Inc., a security company
that advises corporations on cloud security.
"In the last year, cloud providers have changed their stance on
this," he said. "I've worked with one cloud provider who, a year
ago, told me they couldn't put sensitive data on the cloud. Now
they've changed their policy."
Still, some providers may continue to tread lightly before
moving entirely to the cloud.
"The CIO at any of these companies is not going to be rewarded
if they took a big risk by using their own cloud services," said
Mr. Anderson of Gartner.
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