Walmart to Vendors: Get Off Amazon's Cloud (wsj.com) 173
Amazon vs. Walmart saga continues. It turns out, Walmart isn't thrilled about its partners using Amazon's cloud, and it's telling them to get off it (alternative source). From a report: Walmart is telling some technology companies that if they want its business, they can't run applications for the retailer on Amazon's leading cloud-computing service, Amazon Web Services, several tech companies say. [...] Walmart, loath to give any business to Amazon, said it keeps most of its data on its own servers and uses services from emerging AWS competitors, such as Microsoft's Azure.
Shock Horror! (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh, Walmart is being a complete monopolistic dick? Sure didn't see that one coming...
Re:Shock Horror! (Score:4, Insightful)
Before anyone starts ranting that Walmart is not a monopoly, there are two kinds of monopolies. Horizontal where the company controls a particular step of the process across the entire market, and vertical, where the company controls every aspect from beginning to end as much as possible and dictates all aspects of everything that the company deals with.
Walmart would be an example of a vertically-integrated monopoly in this sense. Perhaps not as naturally-so as, say, a steelworks from the late 19th and early 20th century where the company owned everything from the mining-claim to the trucks delivering fabricated parts to customers, but Walmart dictates terms to manufacturers moreso than just about any retail middleman had before, and continues the monolithic control all of the way from the importation process up through the cash register.
Re:Shock Horror! (Score:5, Informative)
vertical, where the company controls every aspect from beginning to end as much as possible and dictates all aspects of everything that the company deals with.
No. Horizontal integration can make you a monopoly. Vertical integration does not, unless you horizontally dominate at least one of the layers. Having dominating power over suppliers is not a monopoly, it is a monopsony [wikipedia.org].
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Before anyone starts ranting that Walmart is not a monopoly, there are two kinds of monopolies. Horizontal where the company controls a particular step of the process across the entire market, and vertical, where the company controls every aspect from beginning to end as much as possible and dictates all aspects of everything that the company deals with.
Poppycock.
The notion of a vertical monopoly does exist, but it's used to describe a monopoly (controller of nearly 100% of a market) that achieved its monopoly status through vertical integration. It is not the case that any vertically-integrated company is a monopoly, even if they have achieved total vertical integration. As long as there is still substantial competition at each level in the supply chain, it isn't a monopoly in any of them. If competition has effectively been eliminated at any level in t
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Walmart dictates terms to manufacturers moreso than just about any retail middleman had before, and continues the monolithic control all of the way from the importation process up through the cash register.
Walmart still pales in comparison to Sears at its peak. In 1960 one in three Americans had a Sears credit card. 1 in every 200 workers in the country worked for Sears. In 1974 they built the tallest building in the world at the time. They literally sold mail-order houses, and of course every single item that you could ever need to put inside that house, including the appliances themselves, which were manufactured under the brands Sears owned. Farmers could order parts for their tractors from Sears.
Walmar
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Walmart is just another store in major urban areas when they bother to show up at all. Here in Boston, for example, they have stores in the suburbs that duke it out with Target and zero presence in the city itself. But Walmart really is a monopoly in rural America; there are many places where you can live where there is no viable alternative to shopping there. Until Amazon came along.
That is why Walmart is so afraid of Amazon. It's pretty much impossible for another retailer to compete with Walmart in the s
Monopoly or not (Score:2)
Before anyone starts ranting that Walmart is not a monopoly, there are two kinds of monopolies. Horizontal where the company controls a particular step of the process across the entire market, and vertical, where the company controls every aspect from beginning to end as much as possible and dictates all aspects of everything that the company deals with.
The second definition here is correctly called "vertical integration," not "vertical monopoly."
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Well, except for the Taxpayer subsidized work units that is.
Re:Shock Horror! (Score:5, Insightful)
No!!! This is not about it being a monopoly; if anything, this is about Wal-Mart as monopsony, a single buyer. It's different.
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Walmart is a dinosaur. It is quickly going the way of the dinosaur in part because of the draconian nature of its power players, grappling with retaining their cash cow instead of doing what a REAL business - in a market economy - does...innovate. Those same, creativity stricken, power players would even be unable to work in a real 9-5 job. Sadly that is the case for most of that echelon.
Re: Shock Horror! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Shock Horror! (Score:5, Insightful)
The history of how Walmart crushed Kmart and other competitors is interesting. Walmart was very innovative, and used technology to streamline their supply chain, cut shrinkage, avoid surplus inventory, etc. This let them cut prices below what their competitors could charge.
They also used tech to forecast demand and improve sales-per-customer. Before Walmart, a department store would have a "men's accessories" section with ties, belts, socks, etc. But then Walmart scrutinized checkout data and make the SHOCKING discovery that people don't buy ties, belts, and socks together. They buy ties with shirts, belts with pants, and socks with shoes. Who would have guessed? So Walmart reconfigured their sales floors to put the belts next to the pants, the ties next to the dress shirts, and the socks near the shoes. The result? Increased sales.
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Odd. I don't think ever in my life I've bought shoes at the same time as socks. For that matter, I almost never buy shoes from the same kind of store that I'd buy my socks from. And I pick up belts when they wear out, not when I get new pants. Maybe I'm weird?
I could at least see matching a tie with a shirt.
Of course I never buy shoes, belts, and a tie together, so there's definitely no value in lumping those three items. I just still have to question the value of this particular insight, particularly compa
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Nah, I'm with him. Never bought socks at the same time as shoes.
When I buy trousers, I use an existing belt. If I need a belt, I buy a belt, I don't buy trousers to go with them.
But.. women. A lot of mens clothing is bought by women. They're all about coordination and matching shit.
This is why ties sell with shirts, and why I can believe belts get sold with trousers.
Walmart's identified trends are at a population level, and even if it's only a 1-2% change in purchasing behaviour that's worth shifting where
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The history of how Walmart crushed Kmart and other competitors is interesting....
Well Sears was the largest retailer in the United States until October 1989 when it was surpassed [wikipedia.org] by Walmart. Amazon is now twice the size [cnn.com] of Walmart.
It speaks to the powerful intransigence of entrenched management culture that companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars fail while others grow to replace them, as opposed to substituting in better executives with the same strategies as their winning competitors. The real infrastructure loss and financial loss to investors is enormous compared to the
Re: Shock Horror! (Score:4, Insightful)
Walmart is on track to become Kmart but they're not there yet. If Walmart did the right things they could crush Amazon.
They opensourced their cloud tools. They have a supply chain management that Amazon wishes it had.
Re:Shock Horror! (Score:5, Interesting)
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You know that Amazon has services in their offerings that their competitors don't, right?
It's very possible for a manufacturer to have built something that is dependent on one of the AWS services that doesn't exist on Azure, and now that Walmart is throwing a hissy fit, they have to completely rearchitect an information system that may run perfectly, and may have been running for months / years?
This is petty and petulant on the part of Walmart. This isn't about 'we don't want our competitor to have sensiti
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It's petty by Walmart but that doesn't excuse designing a system that isn't transferable to other hosting services.
Amazon do offer some great accelerators but you don't have to use them. I'd rather have the flexibility to shift to Azure or another cloud services provider, and use that flexibility to manage my own costs.
It'd also make the Walmart conversation very easy. "Stop using AWS." "ok, done."
Just switch back again afterwards, unless Walmart are going to dicate in their supplier contracts how supplier
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I wouldn't be caught dead at Walmart... or Whole Foods.
They are both manipulative, corrupt retailers (each in their own way).
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This is quite common in the industry, the suppliers are still free to do whatever they want with their own data, but they must follow directions from the customer regarding customer data.
Strange. I'm a customer yet companies are allowed to do whatever they like (against my will) with MY DATA.
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Strange. I'm a customer yet companies are allowed to do whatever they like (against my will) with MY DATA.
If you were single handedly buying 75% of what they were selling, you could probably dictate the terms under which your data was to be used or stored.
Re: Shock Horror! (Score:2)
Once you understand this, it's easy to see why Prime Video's UI is so atrocious and slow on most platforms. It's the afterthought.
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And yet.. it's good enough that I halted my netflix subscription because of it.
It doesn't need to compete on equal terms, the fact that I get Amazon Prime Video and free delivery and some other shit for less than the cost of Netflix makes it an easy choice, and also means I can save money on the Netflix subscription.
If I ditch the £70/month premium TV service (very close to doing that) then I'll want Netflix and Amazon. The problem is that neither of them offer the thing I really want: Films and
Re: Shock Horror! (Score:2)
"Prime Video is a knockoff geared towards upselling. It's primary purpose isn't to be a streaming video platform, it's a false flag freebie for people who want fast shipping free."
Prime free shipping is available in like 6 countries.
Prime video is available about 100.
Something doesn't compute.
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Sure... not monopolistic. They can dictate to their suppliers. They have already been doing this for years. This is just more of the same.
They can bend everyone else over and have their way with them but "they're not a monopoly". Suuuure.
Not that Amazon is much better.
Fuck Walmart (Score:2, Insightful)
I avoid them if at all possible... Amazon gets a fair amount of my business as do local businesses, but Walmart can go fuck themselves...
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i buy next to nothing from amazon and buy water and snacks and other household stuff from jet.com which is wal mart
free shipping i don't have to pay $100 a year for
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Lead infused water by the sound of it.
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better yet, it's my wife's snobby alkaline water that costs a lot more at whole foods and local stores. they even have some ridiculous dairy free chocolate spread she likes
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free shipping i don't have to pay $100 a year for
"Free" shipping? You're joking, right? The cost of shipping is baked into the price of what you're buying.
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yeah, and it's still cheaper than Prime items on amazon, cheaper than paying amazon $99 a year for shipping and cheaper than the local stores
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The total cost is what matters in the end. Doesn't matter what that is.
Although depending on the item, you can recover your "free shipping membership" on a single purchase alone.
Amazon has merely eliminated the games most mail order retailers play with "shipping and handling".
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... a Netflix style video service ...
Not really.
While I'm not a fan of the direction Netflix is going, they do offer their entire catalog to their customers for one flat fee. On the other hand Amazon, for many popular shows, offers a few episodes as "teasers" - and if you want to watch the rest of the series, you have to pay an extra fee per episode.
This seems to be the overall Amazon business model - let you in cheap but then attempt to nickel and dime you to death.
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Jet fails the Arizona test, just like every other online grocery vendor I've found.
24 pack of 24oz cans, labeled .99 on the can- costs 26 bucks+tax
I'll stick with supersaver.
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Straying off-topic a bit, but:
You pay for water?
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No, I pay for potable water. It's approximately 95p per cubic metre plus £28 per year.
Re: Fuck Walmart (Score:5, Insightful)
covfefe
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Washington state and home of Amazon
We have to pay tax's using Amazon, so I don't mess with them.
As for Walmart, I have three Walmart super stores within 8.5 miles of me :)
Re: Fuck Walmart (Score:1)
Amazon has to charge tax on any purchase that occurs in a state they have a business presence in. Now that Amazon has gone full-out on same day deliveries they pretty much have a warehouse in every major city or region. Thus we're all paying taxes regardless. It's not like it was 5 years ago when Amazon just had a few major warehouses and you could evade sales tax coming out of state.
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Amazon has to charge tax on any purchase that occurs in a state they have a business presence in. Now that Amazon has gone full-out on same day deliveries they pretty much have a warehouse in every major city or region. Thus we're all paying taxes regardless. It's not like it was 5 years ago when Amazon just had a few major warehouses and you could evade sales tax coming out of state.
Actually it was my first visit that turned me off to Amazon. It was my first stop for on-line shopping.
Checking out it said Washington state may charge tax soon and I would have to pay tax's on that item; and if Washington didn't they would just keep the extra.
I've never been back
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Don't you have to pay the same taxes when you buy at the nearby WalMarts?
Yes, but I purchase my computer parts from Newegg.com. I've built three computer with them and many odds and ends.
While a glut of Walmarts my food store is called WinCo.
Walmarts have a problem with pricing, one item can be sold for different prices depending upon where you found it.
I took a photo of the lowest price for 6 pack of Pepsi and had to use it at the check out.
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Amazon isn't much different than walmart, for instance have you tried running Amazon Prime videos on a chromcast? Amazon views it as a competitor and so refuses to support it, and then even decided to pull it from their store. even though all their own products are Fire OS which is based on android. so it isn't because they don't know how to interface with Google's tech.
Azure is MORE Secure? (Score:1)
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Let's not forget that Wal*Mart is the same group of geniuses that brought us the laughably insecure CurrentC/MCX - and after that folded, they doubled down, and deployed it anyway as "Wal*Mart Pay".
And seriously? Complaining that your vendor uses AWS for their own business?!?
What's next, saying they'll penalize companies that use Ford delivery trucks?
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This is hilarious. It's anti-competitive and abuse of monopoly position.
WalMart could potentially be taken to task for a lot of shit, but it never is. They don't allow CDs with explicit content, so their selection of music is all censored. This accounts for 2% of WalMart sales, but not 2% of WalMart revenue or profits; it accounts for over 10% of music industry CD sales, or at least it did back before digital streaming became big. That's basically WalMart leveraging its enormous monopoly power to con
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You seem to misunderstand "free speech" completely, as is sadly typical, even though you do at least acknowledge the fact that it involves private enterprise. The guarantee of free speech is primarily a prohibition on the government's ability to suppress your individual right to express your opinions, not a guarantee that anyone must listen to you, nor a mandate for businesses on which products they choose to sell.
I think perhaps you also misunderstand what a "monopoly" is. Even by your own admission, Wal
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You seem to misunderstand "free speech" completely,
Not really, no. We've actually had "freedom of speech" cases ruled against private enterprise for their effective ability to infringe on the rights of others. That's generally only happened when you could reasonably prove that private enterprises can do such a thing, which is exceedingly-rare.
I think perhaps you also misunderstand what a "monopoly" is. Even by your own admission, WalMart only accounted for just over 10% of music sales in the past, and probably far less these days. Since when is 10% of a market a monopoly?
Majority players with less than half of the market have been ruled against in monopoly-abuse cases. It's typically only doable when they're the only big player or one of very few (e.g. a duopoly two-plus market an
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Not really, no. We've actually had "freedom of speech" cases ruled against private enterprise for their effective ability to infringe on the rights of others. That's generally only happened when you could reasonably prove that private enterprises can do such a thing, which is exceedingly-rare.
My understanding is that such cases typically involve suppression of their own employees' free speech, such as attempts to quell discussion of forming a union, for instance. I'd be surprised if there were many cases involving consumers and product selection, but I admit I'm not exactly knowledgeable about such case histories.
I actually agree with most of what you said, but don't quite see how it applies to the topic at hand, except through a rather tortuous leap of logic. You indicate that this topic may
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Re:Azure is MORE Secure? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sadly, while some are already throwing words like "monopoly" around, I suspect this is perfectly above board - these are businesses looking to provide a service *for* Walmart, not sell their products *through* Walmart. As such Walmart is perfectly entitled to specify entirely arbitrary requirements for how Walmart's data and services are provisioned such as mandating a the use of one of their preferred suppliers. If Walmart wants to pay its IT service vendors more to use Azure, Google, or whoever instead of Amazon (assuming Amazon is actually the cheaper option) that's their business, dick move or not. It is, however, probably also going to impact on their bottom line, which might be something the shareholders might want to take note of.
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Sadly, while some are already throwing words like "monopoly" around, I suspect this is perfectly above board -
Not being a lawyer, I don't know if it is legal or not.
It's a dick move either way.
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Maybe if we decided that companies running server farms must legally be separate entities from the businesses that they serve, but in this case, AWS is run by a major competitor in the retail sphere, and there are definitely security concerns for Wal-Mart because the compute services are being offered by the same company.
Corporate espionage is a thing, and cloud services haven't been around long enough to be properly regulated. We're going to find out all sorts of shady stuff in the coming decades that is b
Re:Azure is MORE Secure? (Score:5, Informative)
You've misunderstood what the article about.
Walmart isn't requiring their Vendors to use Walmarts data and services, they are telling supplies (say of plastic bins) that they can't use Amazon's AWS services for anything including internal server backups or anything else. They are trying to leverage their massive purchasing power to use it against Amazon in another market.
Even if Walmart isn't a monpoly they should not be legally able to require suppliers to avoid all Amazon services including those completely unrelated to retailing as they are using their massive purchasing power as a leverage in outside markets. This is the halmark of what the Sherman anti-trust law tried to prevent, companies with massive leverage using that leverage to displace rivals in unrelated markets. AWS is an unrelated market to Walmart, they do not offer services in the web services market.
Contract terms requiring suppliers not use AWS for internal company services should be illegal as it's an attempt to leverage market share to harm a rival in an orthogonal market. These kind of actions dramatically harm the free market.
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Place IBM Softlayer Cloud advertising here (Score:2)
fuck walmart (Score:1)
there is absolutely no reason to use Walmart for a fucking thing unless there is an emergency. You get shit service, can't ever find anyone to help, Goddamn self checkout is always fucking closed (WHY!!!!!!) forcing you to go to the one fucking cashier sitting on register 15 out 30. The really good stores have two registers open. Fuck them and their shitty chinese products. However, to be fair , I have a long list of companies on my "fuck them" list.
Lawsuit in 3, 2, 1... (Score:4, Funny)
Some directors apparently slept through their college discussions on anti-trust and restrictive practices.
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Wallmart isn't even close to having a monopoly on cloud services.
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Walmart doesn't have "partners". They have suppliers who have the hobnail boots on their throat to provide what Walmart wants.
And both links are garbage click bait for WSJ (paywalled) and Fortune (nearly blank page.)
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Obfuscant complained:
And both links are garbage click bait for WSJ (paywalled) and Fortune (nearly blank page.)
You have to enable scripts from fortune.com to see the article. I just have NoScript enable them temporarily, then close the window and revoke the authorization when I'm done reading.
The WSJ link IS just a teaser, though. To read the whole article, you have to subscribe ...
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The WSJ link IS just a teaser, though. To read the whole article, you have to subscribe ...
That's what "paywall" means. And it wasn't a complaint, it was a statement of fact.
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Obfuscant explained:
The WSJ link IS just a teaser, though. To read the whole article, you have to subscribe ...
That's what "paywall" means. And it wasn't a complaint, it was a statement of fact.
I wasn't disagreeing with you, I was merely providing detail for everyone here who did not rtf - which is basically everyone here, as you know.
Also, there is no conflict between complaining and stating a fact. It is entirely possible to do both. As you know ...
Actually, getting out of AWS is good advice (Score:3)
Get out of AWS and GoggleCloud ASAP!
Go instead to either Asure, or to OpenStack...
If you only use IaaS, this is not as critical, but if you use PaaS, SaaS, or are developing your own Cloud Software from scratch, this is critical.
Amazon and Google have their own set of APIs and management interfaces. So, once in their clood, never back to on premises, or to another cloud from a different provider (there are some efforts to replicate some of Amazon's APIs, but those are Tepid and Incomplete).
With Asure and OpenStack, the advantages are plenty. Want to go from on-Premises to Cloud? No problem, both are handled the same way. Want to have hibrid cloud with spillover? again, no problem, your Cloud Sw APIs and infrastructure work the same.
Want competing providers? No problem, in OpenStack there are competitors aplenty, and with Asure, while the SW is ultimately developed by Microsoft alone, there are plenty of channel/partners to set up your public cloud or private one.
Want your cloud no to be in the USoA under control of a USoA company, no problem with Asure or OpenStack.... with Amazon or Google: You are SooL.
So, if you are a sysadmin in a Waltmart provider, use this golden opportunity to justify to the CxO Suite (and justify plenty of funding for) a project to migrate from AWS (or Google) to some OpenStack or Asure Provider...
Best of luck and all the power to you!
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Then go to OpenStack and be happy... (I pitched OpenStack as well, in case you did not notice).
As a matter of fact, I am a Technical trainer for, among other things, OpenStack (also, storage and servers), so, it behooves me if everyone getting out of AWS or GoogleCloud goes to OpenStack (more work, more £€¥$)...
So, no astroturfing. Just Honest opinion, I'd love evryone to go form AWS or GoogleCloud to OpenStack instead of Asure, but the reality is that not everyone can do so, or will do so
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Spanish Speaker here, so, sorry for the _z_ and _s_ confusion.
and, may I remind you of two things:
1.) I pitched Openstack as well
2.) You can install azure in your datacenter, paying MS the respective licenses, and it will work and behave as would an Azure public cloud, either the Microsoft one, or one provided by a partner... So, both with azure, and with OpenStack, you can move your workloads from the public cloud of one company to the public cloud of another company, or publicprivate cloud pretty much sea
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Companies aren't looking before they leap (Score:4, Interesting)
The cloud provider has complete access to the hypervisor, and still could access the data in memory even if it is encrypted at-rest and in-flight. If their hardware platform uses Intel's AMT or the AMD's PSP, a third party could do the same remotely. Colocated VMs could also reach the data through either VM escape or cache-based jamming agreement.
You are correct that the pain will be legal, even tho not for the cloud provider(s) but for their customers. I'm not sure about the regulation in the US, but in Europe I remain fully responsible for the confidentiality of my customer data even if I outsource the hosting to a cloud provider. And thanks to new regulation coming into force next year, my fines will be doubled if a leak happens through negligence... and deciding to host on a cloud with the issues of the previous paragraph can be construed as negligence.
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Amazon is an analytics company. They don't need access to your data. They already have access to your metadata. If you use their internal DNS you leak information. If you route traffic (even encrypted traffic) via their network that is not routed elsewhere via tunnel, they know who you contact.
Much like we discovered how many tanks Germany was making in WWII, Amazon can apply some advanced math at your encrypted traffic patterns and deduce many things about your business.
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Talking from what I have seen when working in managed services and shared/cloud hosting environments... some admins have no qualms reading clients' mailboxes or snooping around clients' data when they're bored. Triply so if it's a follow-the-sun team, where only one localization is familiar with (or realistically gives a fuck about) European data privacy laws.
Two words: Homomorphic encryption (Score:2)
Homomorphic encryption [youtube.com] is well suited for this situation - you can even perform operations on the data stored in the cloud, and the cloud provider isn't able to eavesdrop on anything, because decryption isn't required.
Even without homomorphic encryption, there are plenty of HSM (hardware security module) devices which are widely used to handle encryption in a way that the cloud provider doesn't have access to the encryption key, nor do they have the ability to decrypt data.
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So you are claiming Amazon data mines customers of AWS?!? I can't tell if you are attempting to fearmonger, or if you are just a complete idiot.
No, he's claiming that if Amazon *were* to be data mining the AWS information from known Wal-Mart vendors and partners for strategic information that would be useful for Amazon, there would be no meaningful way to detect it. Though Amazon has managed to be "generally less evil" than the other major cloud providers, it would still require Wal-Mart to place massive trust in their biggest competitor to act ethically.
Wal-Mart isn't saying not to use Azure or GCC or Rackspace; they're not concerned about the sys
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>So you are claiming Amazon data mines customers of AWS?!
Yes. Yes they do. And if you can't think of how you are the idiot with a complete lack of imagination.
Measurements of encrypted traffic between known data sources can give huge amount of information about the amount and type of business your competitor is doing. For example, the amount of routed traffic to IP addresses held by credit card processors. Significant fluctuations can give lots of info about the health of the company. Packets being route
CVS is also tabling it. (Score:2)
If there isn't a consortium of Walmart's vendors.. (Score:2)
If there isn't a consortium of Walmart's vendors, there should be. That seems like a logical direction for our progression of absurdity. "Corporations are people". Powerful "people". Powerful enough to form a union with which Walmart would have no choice but to sign a fair contract.
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Supliers will do cost-benefit analysis (Score:2)
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>Walmart may be the loser when they won't sell these name brand, popular items.
To avoid doing business with walmart is to invite death. To do business with walmart is to embrace death. P&G is not going to lose a multibillion dollar account because of AWS.
What happened to Walmart's cloud portability? (Score:2)
I seem to remember Walmart trying to do the Silicon Valley thing a couple of years ago, opening an office there (run by SV cultural standards, not Benton, Ark. standards) and making a bunch of noise about developing a cloud portability system that would let vendors easily move workloads (which I understood to be more like virtualization workloads than docker-type containers) between cloud providers.
Whatever happened to this? Did OpenStack meet their needs and they gave up on the concept, or what? Maybe my
Is it me, or does this smell like anti-trust (Score:2)
Several are commenting on if this makes Walmart a monopoly (or some permutation thereof)... and we're talking about the same laws that govern anti-trust violations and monopolies... but to me this sounds more like anti-trust style collusion. Multiple companies (Walmart and their suppliers) with some common interests organizing to give preferential or (in this case) discriminatory treatment to one or a small group of companies or individuals. Amazon is not hurting for customers, but this is hard to see as an
Get off Amazon's cloud? (Score:3)
Or "Satya just gave me a very nice yacht".
"quality" (Score:2)
Nothing to See Here (Score:2)
Why is this action surprising to anyone? If you were running a business, would you allow your direct competitor access to your (or your suppliers) pricing information? That would clearly give them the upper hand. Anyone who thinks that's a smart idea should be fired.
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Sure, but isn't the point of offloading to a cloud-computing service to let someone else worry about the box?
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You would use 'ubernetes' to manage your cloud computers hosted on different cloud platforms. Just tell your controller to not use the AWS instances for Wal*Mart business I guess.
[John]
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They sell Crisco routers and Sonny televisions.
Re:I've never shopped there (Score:5, Funny)
They sell Crisco routers and Sonny televisions.
My Crisco router got fried.
Re:I've never shopped there (Score:5, Funny)
Oh man, looks like the chips are down!
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You are confusing monopoly coercion with a corporate acquisition.
Nice try though.
Conglomerates are not a new or interesting thing.
Hell, as potentially evil and dangerous as Amazon is they are a platform to competitors that fill in Amazon's own gaps. That can be very handy sometimes.
Simple solution (Score:2)
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