Amazon Wants To Run Your High-Performance Databases 142
jfruh (300774) writes "Amazon is pushing hard to be as ubiquitous in the world of cloud computing as it is in bookselling. The company's latest pitch is that even your highest-performing databases will run more efficiently on Amazon Web Services cloud servers than on your own hardware. Farming out your most important and potentially sensitive computing work to one of the most opaque tech companies out there: what could possibly go wrong?"
Could we can the marketing crap? (Score:5, Interesting)
People, "cloud computing" is nothing but a rather thinly veiled mix of software as a service and server hosting, ok? The reason why we needed a new word for it is that the former had a very bad rep by now (and it fully earned that rep), and the latter is anything but edgy and cool anymore.
Could we, at least here, avoid the whole marketing lingo? It may be "cloudy" to markedroids and management, but I guess we DO know here that the data is not just put "somewhere in the cloud", right?
The mainframe is dead (Score:0, Interesting)
Long live the mainframe
Re:Cloud is dead (Score:2, Interesting)
Even though about 80% of what Snowden "leaked" is hyperbole meant to stir up shit? After listening to the interview [nbcnews.com] I'm convinced that a ton of this information is utter crap. "ooh I'm a spy" "ooh I was trained by the CIA" Does the NSA have a bulk collection program? Yes. Do the US Federal Courts screw us over on privacy issues? Yes. Do the FISA courts represent a black hole in the justice system? No more than the IRS' Tax Courts but both are invalid "justice" systems meant to screw over Americans. Was any of this known before Snowden? To a large extent no, but programs like ECHELON [wikipedia.org] were known to be gathering bulk intelligence for years including spying on Americans using our allies. [whatreallyhappened.com] This has been known since the 90s folks, it's nothing new! All the NSA/spy community did was extend ECHELON into the Internet realm. Cellphones and the patriot act did more to let the government in on your movements more than anything else, all in the name of "fighting terrorists."
With the progress in technology affecting our daily lives, are we that naieve to assume that the government isn't making the same kinds of leaps in tracking us when organizations like Google, Equifax, the US Postal Service [huffingtonpost.com] even your TV with ToS like LG watching what you watch. Wake up and smell the cat shit folks, Snowden is the Inspector Clouseau [wikipedia.org] of the espionage world.
What we need is a Constitutional Amendment enforcing the right to privacy in this country, also forcing an end to spying on US citizens and to secret/out of due process courts/legal systems.
Re:FTFY (Score:5, Interesting)
Um, actually Amazon tries not to make a profit. I'm not sure they've ever made more than 2% profit in a quarter. Typically, closer to 0%.
https://www.google.com/finance... [google.com]
That's excess profit. That's like saying you didn't make any money last year because you spent it all on a house and a boat.
Amazon is making plenty of profits. It's just spending them on expanding so it doesn't actually post profits but if you look
at it's total net worth you can see that it is still growing every year.