Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services.
CNBC
Kicking off Amazon Web Services is rare, but it has enormous consequences.
It happened this week when Amazon Parler, a social network that got conservatives, gave up after Twitter banned President Donald Trump and contained content that encouraged violence. Parler filed a lawsuit against Amazon in federal district court in an attempt to stop Amazon from suspending Parler’s account, and Amazon pushed back and asked the court to deny Parler’s motion.
The incident shows a kind of power that Amazon uses almost uniquely, because so many businesses rely on it to provide computer and data storage. According to estimates by technology research firm Gartner, Amazon controlled 45% of the cloud infrastructure in 2019, more than any other company. The app survived without being listed in Apple and Google’s app stores, but being sent away from Amazon’s cloud left Parler absent for days.
Parler’s engineering team built software that uses computer resources from Amazon Web Services, and the company spoke to Amazon about adopting its own AWS database and artificial intelligence services, the company said in a district court on Wednesday.
It will take time to figure out how similar functions can be performed on Parler’s own servers or a cloud other than AWS. And in Parler’s case, the time is critical, because it came when the service attracted attention and got new users after the Trump ban on Twitter.
Parler engineers can learn to use other computer infrastructure, or the company can hire developers who already have this knowledge. But because no cloud provider is as popular as Amazon, people who are skilled in, says Oracle’s cloud, are not as easy to find as those who know how to build on AWS.
The warnings were there
The speed with which Amazon has acted should not come as a shock. Companies have been announcing details of their deals with Amazon for years warning of this kind of sudden strike.
In 2010, the DNA sequence of the company Complete Genomics said that “an interruption of services by Amazon Web Services, on which we rely to provide completed genomic data to our customers, will result in our customers not receiving their data on time.”
Gambling company Zynga warned about how its AWS foundation could disappear quickly when it submitted the prospectus for the initial public offering in 2011. AWS at the time offered half the traffic for Zynga’s games, such as FarmVille and Words with Friends, the company said. .
“AWS may terminate the Agreement without reason by giving 180 days prior written notice, and may terminate the Agreement with 30 days prior written notice of the matter, including any material default or breach of the Agreement by us that we do not within the 30- day period, ‘said Zynga.
AWS may even, under certain circumstances, terminate or suspend its agreement with a customer immediately, as in 2010 with Wikileaks, which indicates violations of AWS ‘Terms of Service.
Parler started using AWS in 2018, long after the Wikileaks incident and the first revelations about the possibility of interruptions in the cloud.
When AWS told Parler that he intended to suspend Parler’s AWS account, he said that Parler had repeatedly violated the terms, including by not owning or controlling the rights to its contents.
Over the course of a few weeks, AWS warned Parler about instances of user content that encouraged violence, Amazon said in the lawsuit. More of the content surfaced after protesters stormed the Capitol building in Washington on January 6 and interrupted Congress’ confirmation of the outcome of the 2020 presidential election college. AWS believes Parler is not doing enough to quickly remove that kind of information from his social network.
Parler could have protected himself more. Large AWS customers can sign up for more extensive agreements, giving more customers time to comply if they break the rules.
Gartner analyst Lydia Leong spelled out the difference in a blog post: ‘Thirty days is a common time frame that specifies a cure period in contracts (and is the cure period in the AWS standard business agreement), but cloud provider’s click-through agreements (such as since the AWS customer agreement does not normally have a healing period, the provider can act immediately, ‘she writes.
Other cloud providers have their own conditions that their customers must meet. However, AWS now has millions of customers and owns more of the cloud infrastructure market than any other provider. As a result, many organizations may be exposed to the kind of treatment Parler received, barely as it is, if they do not act according to Amazon’s standards.
Parler saw the disadvantages of a cloud provider, but in the end, the flexibility of clouds was too attractive to ignore. “I am personally very much anti-cloud and anti-centralization, although AWS has its place for traffic that bursts a lot,” Alexander Blair, chief technology officer at Parler, wrote in a message on the service.
Parler and Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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