First up from Yahoo Finance:
Amazon stock forfeits gains after company warns on 'optimizations' from AWS customers
Amazon (AMZN) reported first quarter earnings on Thursday that beat expectations and initially sent shares surging, but cautious comments regarding a slowdown in its key Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud unit saw the stock reverse all of these gains in extended trading.
Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky told investors on the company's earnings call AWS customers are continuing "optimizations" in their spending and guided to a notable slowdown in growth from the segment, spooking investors.
Amazon shares were down about 2% near 8:00 p.m. ET Thursday evening.
"As expected, customers continue to evaluate ways to optimize their cloud spending in response to these tough economic conditions in the first quarter," Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky told analysts on the company's earnings call. "We are seeing these optimizations continue into the second quarter with April revenue growth rates about 500 basis points lower than what we saw in Q1."Revenue in Amazon's AWS unit grew 16% during the first quarter, down from an annual growth rate of 37% seen in the same quarter last year.
Olsavsky sought to cushion the blow of this guidance by telling investors, "we're not trying to optimize for any one quarter or year. We're working to build customer relationships and a business that will outlast all of us."....
And from ServiceStack's blog, September 6, 2022:
In pursuit of the best value US cloud provider
At ServiceStack, we have been using AWS for hosting for over 10 years. It has served us well, but it suffers from complex pricing and possibility of bill shock due to its fractured pay-as-you-go design.
Thankfully, more and more companies are providing simpler offerings for hosting needs, and AWS themselves launched Lightsail as their answer to market demands for simple hosting options that package everything you need for basic hosting.
These simpler hosting options tend to bundle several things together as one fixed monthly price. A VM with a specific compute and memory allocation, as well as data transfer, and storage.
Looking at different US offerings
Something we wanted to do was to host our live demo applications on a US based host. We were using Hetzner dedicated servers in the past for non-latency sensitive use cases like our build server and Gist.Cafe (our interactive playground for multiple platforms) but we also wanted our demo applications to be snappy for US users.DigitalOcean provides "Droplets" with this fixed pricing model with a nice and simple interface. Their pricing was quite good and we realized we could run all 20+ of our demo applications on a single droplet for $40/month.
For deployment, we also like to keep things as simple as we can, whilst keeping portability. Since all our projects are public and on GitHub, we use GitHub Actions heavily along with a pattern that deploys our applications using Docker Compose via SSH. Each application runs in its own container behind an NGINX proxy with a side car that handles renewing LetsEncrypt certificates. Below is an example of this pattern with Blazor and Litestream.
A nice side effect of this approach is moving servers is relatively painless. We change the DNS entry for the application to point to our new server, update the GitHub Action Secrets if needed and run our Release workflow.
A minute or so later, the application is back running again. Since their were 20+ of these repositories we took advantage of the GitHub Organization Secrets so we only needed to update values in one place, and running the workflows again can also be done programmatically through the GitHub CLI.
DigitalOcean Price Increase
In June of 2022, we got a notification that prices for droplets would be increasing, and for our droplet it would be going from $40 to $48. While this is a small amount of money, it prompted us to have a wider look into this market.Something we try to do at ServiceStack is to not only provide a comprehensive .NET Framework for building API first systems, but also seek out great value hosting options we can recommend in this ever change space which we're happy to share, like this blog post, that might be useful to our users and others.
Not everyone builds massively distributed systems, and as hardware performance increases, and platforms like .NET are becoming even more optimized, a setup with just a server or two can manage larger loads and use cases....
....MUCH MORE
