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How Amazon Keeps Cutting AWS Prices: Cheapskate Culture

Posted by timothy on from the mining-the-couch-for-change dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Amazon Web Services has cut its prices on 40-plus consecutive occasions, at times leading the charge, at other times countering similar moves by Microsoft and Google. This article at CRN includes some interesting behind-the-scenes trivia about how Amazon keeps costs down, including some interesting speculation — for example, that perhaps the reason Amazon's Glacier storage is so cheap is that maybe it might be based at least partly on tape, not disk (Amazon would not comment). The article also explains that the company will only pay for its employees to fly Economy, and that includes its senior executives. If they feel the need to upgrade to Business or First Class, they must do so from their own pocket. And instead of buying hardware from an OEM vendor, AWS sources its own components – everything from processors to disk drives to memory and network cards — and uses contract manufacturing to put together its machines."

9 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Business class is a misnomer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Unless you work in finance, oil/gas or certain luxury markets and have money to burn you're flying economy no matter what industry you're in. It's not being cheap, it's being smart. You're stil going to get to the same place at the same time as the other passengers.

    1. Re:Business class is a misnomer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      Some people do not enjoy travel and upgrading them is one way to encourage them to do it more often.

  2. Economy Class Only by CohibaVancouver · · Score: 5, Informative

    The requirement of 'no business class' for air travel isn't unique to Amazon. Every tech company I've worked for had the same policy - From the senior execs on down.

    Thankfully, the company I work for now doesn't require red-eye flights. So I can arrive at a destination, sleep overnight in a hotel bed, then wake up the next morning and start working.

    1. Re:Economy Class Only by binarylarry · · Score: 4, Informative

      Little planes can also be scary as fuck.

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    2. Re:Economy Class Only by bsane · · Score: 4, Informative

      They have (had?) regular flights between their west coast locations, you just show up and take a seat. I don't know that they fly charter flights anywhere else on a regular basis. It also wasn't unique to Intel, HP used to do something very similar.

    3. Re:Economy Class Only by CohibaVancouver · · Score: 5, Informative

      And I'm sure if you ever actually flew with one our your senior execs, you'd be mystified why you can't find them in the coach section...

      A couple of years ago I flew back from Mobile World Congress (Barcelona) in economy class. An Intel exec was seated next to me and an IBM exec was across the aisle.

  3. AWS is NOT cheap by afidel · · Score: 5, Informative

    AWS is expensive, I can provide the equivalent of an m3.large reserved instance to my users for 1/4th the cost over 3 years, if you ammatorize my infrastructure over 5 years (which is what we've actually been doing) then it's almost 1/7th as much. The only places where AWS makes sense is if you're a quickly growing startup, have a VERY bursty workload, or you're so small that you can't justify 3 hosts for a VMWare Essentials bundle.

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  4. Walmart on the web by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Amazon has always been about low costs. It's why I love them as a customer, but ran the other way after interviewing for a job there. Their offices (at least the ones I saw in a Seattle tower) were dirty and dingy. I'm kind of a neat freak, and don't like that kind of atmosphere at home, so I could not handle the idea of tolerating it every day at work.

  5. Amazon principles by subanark · · Score: 3, Informative

    The Amazon business is focused around it's core principles:
    http://www.amazon.com/Values-C...

    Notice that "Frugality" is listed as one of them.