I can imagine funding their direct competitor (which they're losing to) might not be a great idea.

I wonder if that mentality with change if/when AWS splits from AMZN.

Amazon Retail would be an unsustainable mess without AWS.

Lol yes Amazon was definitely not a thriving company before AWS, good point.

Why is that?

AWS has much fatter margins than retail.

There are substitutes for AWS, but the switching cost is relatively high. Whereas for toothpaste, breakfast cereal, toasters, books etc etc the substitution is perfect (I can buy the same brands from many companies) and switching cost is low (I pull out a credit card).

Insofar as Amazon has a large free cashflow coming off AWS after capital improvements, it can use that money to (a) attract cheap funding from Wall St to (b) build, build, build.

Dear God I hope the FTC cleaves vertically not horizontally.

AWS isn't the only cloud, and several AWS competitors have similar or better performance numbers. This isn't it.

Having used most of the competition, none can consistently compete. While they may have some better numbers, configuration complexity and user experience make achieving them in real-world use difficult

Having used every major public cloud I find google cloud to be the easiest to configure and manage.

Google clouds network is superior to AWS. I would be very surprised if a head to head comparison didn't have GCP in the lead as far as speed.

Lol, amazon retail still hardly uses AWS. They use mostly their custom nosql database sable and a ton of Oracle SQL databases (albeit, a decent amount of those are getting migrated to rds postgresql)

This is not true. Amazon turned off oracle DB late last year and is trending Oracle free.

https://twitter.com/ajassy/status/1060979175098437632

May sound like a silly question but does Amazon ecommerce actually run on AWS?

I hear it might be azure when cloud but mostly on prem. (See one cloud)