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Re:Handling five billion sessions a day in real time by metaphorm on Friday February 20, 2015 @10:42AM (#9080841)
they are the dominant vendor of hardware/hosting to the largest and most complex web applications on the internet. AWS is the pillar that some of the most high volume sites on the internet (like Twitter and Netflix) rely on. Its safe to say that without AWS (or some other similar vendor) the internet as we know it wouldn't exist.
Re:Handling five billion sessions a day in real time by latch on Friday February 20, 2015 @10:57AM (#9080912)
That's ridiculous. It's like you're saying: without Honda, the car industry, as we know it, wouldn't exist.

The hosting industry is huge. There's a ton options, many of them better, larger and older than AWS. There are so many sites that don't use AWS. For example, I believe that, pre-Google, youtube used ServerBeach.

Re:Handling five billion sessions a day in real time by sanderjd on Friday February 20, 2015 @11:41AM (#9081215)
> There's a ton options, many of them better, larger and older than AWS.

Some examples would be more interesting than a general "you're wrong".

Re:Handling five billion sessions a day in real time by latch on Friday February 20, 2015 @12:29PM (#9081504)
For every site that's reliant on AWS, there's probably more than 10 000 that aren't. The giants, for example: Google. Facebook. Wikipedia. Microsoft.

It's hard to get actual numbers, but Equinix might be the largest. I believe their Singapore data center is actually what AWS, Digital Ocean and Azure use. (there's a lot more of these, such as Internap and Level 3 (which provided (and might still) services for Netflix and iTunes.))

AT&T is quite large. World of Warcraft used to be hosted on AT&T's infrastructure (might still be).

The above tend to be for large setups. Going smaller, you have the Rackspaces and Softlayers (now IBM). And, to a lesser extent, providers like OVH and Hetzner.

And, you can't forget the likes of Digital Ocean and Linode.

It's hard to come up with examples because more things are examples than aren't. AWS' market share is growing, but that's to be expected, in a lot of ways, despite EC2 being ~10 years old , it's still a new player.

AFAIC, what's more interesting about AWS is:

1 - How dominating it is over Microsoft and Google

2 - How popular the less invasive offerings are. A lot of people are sticking to their colocated, dedicated or VPSs, while using some part of AWS for DNS, backups or email. I hope they keep this up.

Re:Handling five billion sessions a day in real time by sanderjd on Friday February 20, 2015 @01:22PM (#9081872)
Thanks for the reply—exactly what I was hoping for!
Re:Handling five billion sessions a day in real time by nullrouted on Friday February 20, 2015 @03:25PM (#9082771)
I'm not saying right or wrong but here are some examples:

WhatsApp (Pre-Facebook) - Softlayer

Youtube (Pre-Google) - ServerBeach

Vevo - Rackspace

Zendesk - Rackspace

GoCardless - Softlayer

Snapchat - Softlayer