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Walmart to Vendors: Get Off Amazon's Cloud (wsj.com)
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.
Huh, Walmart is being a complete monopolistic dick? Sure didn't see that one coming...
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...
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?
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Came on Walmart not the MS Cloud !!!
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.
Than AWS? It's not as crazy as it sounds...
love is just extroverted narcissism
Some directors apparently slept through their college discussions on anti-trust and restrictive practices.
Sure, but isn't the point of offloading to a cloud-computing service to let someone else worry about the box?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Azure isn't owned by a company that is in direct competition with some of Walmart's businesses. This has nothing to do with sane or cost effective business practices for their IT service vendors and everything to do with trying to leverage the fact that Walmart is the bigger player (than the vendors) to deny revenue for a competitor.
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.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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 constrict free speech--it's still a tough case due to WalMart being a private enterprise, but it'd be an interesting Supreme Court case.
Consider: we have a lot of consumer protections that amount to, "You're infringing on consumers's rights because they have no alternative and they're not free to choose." Cell phones need to be unlockable or unlocked because everybody locks them. Net Neutrality is there basically because consumers will never be able to get the benefits of a neutral network otherwise. "You're too damned big and you behave like a de-facto part of government" is the unspoken argument. WalMart is that.
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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!
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
They sell Crisco routers and Sonny televisions.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
They sell Crisco routers and Sonny televisions.
My Crisco router got fried.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Not a lawyer either, but I do deal with tenders for contracts such as this and in general it's absolutely above board to specify a list of preferred suppliers as part of a tender, so unless the US has some specific exception this falls foul of I'm not aware of then Walmart is perfectly entitled to do this. Their systems/data, their rules. It's no different from someone insisting on a given vendor's hardware or software - e.g. Munich mandating that their application stack be open source, to give a more Slashdot friendly example of the practice. That *is* a sane idea, particularly if you're a company or organization of the scale of Walmart and don't want your infrastructure to be built on a grab bag of different platforms selected by whatever vendor happened to win each contract.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Companies need to be very careful about what data is being stored in someone else's datacenter.
I'm sure if enough of Walmart's suppliers store enough data in AWS, Amazon could get some tremendous insights into Walmart's supply chain.
In my opinion too many companies have rushed to the cloud and have not completely thought out the repercussions of that choice. If your data is stored in AWS or Azure is it really your data? What if the Government decides to subpoena your data and your company decides to fight the subpoena, but Amazon decides it isn't worth the trouble - and they hand over your data?
The day of reckoning is coming for cloud services and it won't be technical that brings the pain - it will be legal.
Oh man, looks like the chips are down!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Picked up a rumor that CVS was planning to move to AWS, they decided not to go to AWS.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Perhaps the name of the consortium of vendors you are looking for is called the PRC.
And yet the government isn't stopping Amazon from buying Whole Foods....wait you weren't talking about that were you.....
Who said it was MORE evil.
Well, except for the Taxpayer subsidized work units that is.
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]
Shit better not happen!
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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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, 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? No one is hampering the ability of another retailer to sell those products, and obviously plenty of them did and still do. Consumers always had plenty of choices there, unlike with ISPs and carrier providers.
There are plenty of legitimate criticisms to direct at WalMart. I don't believe this to be one of them, though.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
The simple solution is to rent a couple small Azure instances, and proxy all of your AWS traffic through there. As far as WalMart knows, your new site is hosted in Azure!
WTB [sig], PST!!!
Some of the stuff you can buy at Walmart will be from fairly large corporations having their brands as well as be Walmart banded stuff like soap and toothpaste from Procter and Gamble, Dickies from Dickies, and many more items. If any of these brands use AWS for some or all of their data handling how likely is it that they'll drop AWS just to get shelf space or product pages on Jet? If you want Crest toothpaste or Tide detergent and it's not at Walmart you have many other places to go, Including Amazon. Will the cost of moving to another data storage service make up for the loss in business at Walmart? If not, Walmart may be the loser when they won't sell these name brand, popular items.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
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 memory fails me, but I seem to recall that they were definitely interested in portability to AWS at the time.
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.
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 being done now, on corporately-owned hardware, and will be illegal later. I have no idea what that shady stuff is, but I expect to read about it in the papers in the next 20-30 years.
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."
Um, no - you need to read the quote in the summary more carefully. It's talking about technology companies that want to help run Walmart's IT services for them and, if they do, that "they can't run applications _for_ the retailer on Amazon's leading cloud-computing service". That's pretty clearly discussing managed IT services being provided to Walmart, not tangible products being sold through them. Other than the dick move nature of it to lock out a competitor rather than on technical grounds, it does actually make sense as a practice and is perfectly legal in every single area around the globe I've dealt with tenders. It's called a mandated or preferred supplier list depending on how strict you want it to be and it's to ensure that when you go to tender the respondants are all going to propose a solution that is compatible with what you already have in place and won't require that you introduce new training and skill set requirements on your staff.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I never understood why people use AWS. It's a big, smelly, awkward, and expensive beast run by Amazon. The Amazon console is a disaster to navigate let alone actually use it and their API is an equally terrible nightmare of poorly written documentation with bloated SDKs. DigitalOcean is cheaper than AWS, has a much nicer API and dashboard, and the community has put together some nice SDKs and tools.
Also OVH, a Canadian company that has been around since the mid-1990's, has even more impressive VPS and cloud solutions and is even cheaper than DO but they have some account billing issues they really need to work on (e.g. automated renewals).
Psssst- There's a liberal under your bed.
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 and you have 34% of the market), or when they have large exclusive markets.
WalMart isn't the only retail store; it's a major source of sales of some classes of goods to some demographics, and frequently considered to be in a duopoly with Target. Target has better profits, WalMart has a bigger general market. The capacity to damage and thus control not one competitor, but an entire market, is generally enough to get you some unwanted attention.
We have, in fact, taken steps of varying degrees of severity against these sorts of things, and not just with government lawsuits and monopoly hearings. There have been rulings against for-profit private colleges dictating that they must allow students to speak on any and all political topics because the college was violating the free speech of certain groups by banning them from assembling and speaking based on their topic. We create an enormous span of regulatory policies forcing businesses away from the violation of some consumers's rights. Contract law doesn't even allow you to waive your rights through private contracts--so much so that a contract which does so can be wholly-invalid if it has no provision nor reasonable method for invalidating those specific clauses.
The government can't go into every corner deli and tell them people can't be sent out for discussing gay marriage while eating there. They have determined that some companies are in such a position that the rules actually do apply to them. That's why most of us aren't lawyers: the things that happen in law don't always fit with what you'd understand after reading the damned thing. An encyclopedic knowledge of case law is a strong requirement.
From that position, I still say it would have been amusing to see certain lawsuits brought up against WalMart. They might not win, but they did, at one time, have a reasonable argument here and there.
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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 anything but a move to damage their customer base.
Not throwing any pitty-parties... just what it looks like to me.
Loren Osborn
Homomorphic encryption 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.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
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 be too complex for non-lawyers to understand. I tend to disagree here - I think it's a very straightforward matter of retailers being allowed to sell what they want within reasonable, well-regulated constraints. The law is not intended to serve lawyers, but the public interest, and I can't see in this particular case how consumers were harmed in any way.
I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one. Fortunately, the courts so far seem to agree with my take on things.
P.S. Lawsuits are only "amusing" until one gets directed your way.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
You are a Walmart supplier using AWS
Walmart asks you to do a thing
chances are you store more data or more frequently or differently
Amazon doesnt need to hack the db or look or anything
Just like the TLAs use metadata, Amazon can use traffic analysis to work out what is happening
Key point:
Completely legally - they will not be peeking at the data at all - just a special case of optimising AWS.
Or "Satya just gave me a very nice yacht".
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Wal-Mart will tell a supplier what it is willing to pay for a item and then the supplier makes the item with materials that let the supplier still make a profit. And the supplier will sell at the price level set by Wal-Mart at least until the items built to sell in Wal-Mart start getting a degraded reputation. Amazon, does not care what the supplier charges as long as Amazon gets its cut. Amazon sells lots of stuff with a level of quality that leaves much to be desired. But, I think that most customers will blame the supplier for the lack of quality, not Amazon. Wal-Mart customers blame Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart has a reputation for treating suppliers like beggars.
Passionately Indifferent
The article is from WSJ and the so called alternative source is a rewording of the WSJ article, even going so far as to use 'according to WSJ' to downplay any non investigating of their own.
Quit using FUCKING WSJ articles. What's next, National Enquirer as a reliable source?
PlanetVulkan.com
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.
Just another day in Paradise
This story is simply not true. What WalMart is doing is telling suppliers they must host their own product images and feed them to WalMart's website.
Nothing in any of the official communication from WalMart about this said ANYTHING about a preferred cloud vendor.
This story comes from SnowFlake Computing, a startup that's trying to make a name for itself... but as of yet hasn't got squat.
Murphy was an optimist