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Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services.
CNBC
The launch of Amazon Web Services is rare, but it has huge consequences.
It happened this week, when Amazon scrapped Talk, a social network that gained popularity with conservatives after Twitter banned President Donald Trump and hosted content that encouraged violence. Parler brought an action against Amazon in federal district court to try to prevent Amazon from suspending Parler’s account, and Amazon pushed back, asking the court to dismiss Parler’s petition.
The incident demonstrates a kind of power that Amazon wields almost uniquely, as many companies depend on it to provide compute and data storage. Amazon controlled 45% of cloud infrastructure in 2019, more than any other company, according to estimates by technology research firm Gartner. The app survived without being listed in Apple’s and Google’s app stores, but being kicked out of the Amazon cloud left Speaking out of the internet for days.
Parler’s engineering team had built software that leveraged the computing resources of Amazon Web Services, and the company had been in talks with Amazon to adopt a proprietary AWS database and artificial intelligence services. the company said in a district court filing Wednesday.
It would take time to figure out how to perform similar functions on Parler’s own servers or in a cloud other than AWS. And in the case of Speaking, the time is critical, as it came as the service was gaining attention and new users following Trump’s Twitter ban.
Parler’s engineers could learn to use a different IT infrastructure, or the company could hire developers who already have this knowledge. But since no cloud provider is as popular as Amazon, people who are skilled in, say, the Oracle cloud are not as easy to find as those who know how to rely on AWS.
The warnings were there
How quickly Amazon acted shouldn’t come as a shock. The companies have leaked details of their deals with Amazon that have warned of these types of sudden shutdowns for years.
In 2010, the DNA sequencing company Complete Genomics stated that “an interruption in the services of Amazon Web Services, which we rely on to provide finite genomic data to our customers, will result in our customers not receiving their data on time.”
Games company Zynga warned that its AWS foundation could quickly disappear when it filed the prospectus for its initial public offering in 2011. At the time, AWS hosted half of the traffic for Zynga games, such as FarmVille. and Words with Friends, the company said. .
“AWS may terminate the Agreement without cause by providing 180 days written notice, and may terminate the Agreement with 30 days’ written notice for cause, including any material defect or breach of the Agreement on our part that we do not. do not remedy within 30 days. day period, “Zynga said.
AWS may even immediately terminate or suspend its agreement with a customer in certain circumstances, as it did in 2010 with Wikileaks, indicating violations of AWS’s terms of service.
Talking started using AWS in 2018, long after the Wikileaks incident and the first company disclosures about the possibility of cloud disruptions.
When AWS told Parler it planned to suspend Parler’s AWS account, it said Parler violated the terms on several occasions, including not owning or controlling the rights to its content.
Over the course of several weeks, AWS alerted Speak to instances of user content that encouraged violence, Amazon said in a court filing. More of this content surfaced after protesters stormed the Capitol building in Washington on January 6, disrupting Congressional confirmation of the Electoral College’s results for the 2020 presidential election. AWS has indicated that Parler was not doing enough to quickly remove this type of information from its social network.
Talking could have protected himself more. Large AWS customers can sign up to more extensive agreements, giving them more time to become compliant if they end up breaking the rules.
Gartner analyst Lydia Leong explained this difference in a blog post: “Thirty days is a common time period specified as a healing period in contracts (and is the healing period in the AWS standard enterprise contract) , but cloud provider click-through agreements (such as like the AWS Customer Agreement) normally do not have a cure period, allowing immediate action to be taken at the provider’s discretion, ”she wrote .
Other cloud providers have their own terms that their customers must follow. However, AWS now has millions of customers and has more of the cloud infrastructure market than any other vendor. As a result, many organizations could be exposed to the type of treatment Parler has received, however rare, if they fail to behave according to Amazon’s standards.
Parler recognized the downsides of being beholden to a cloud provider, but in the end, the cloud offering for flexibility was too appealing to ignore. “Personally, I am very anti-cloud and anti-centralization, although AWS has its place for high-burst traffic,” wrote Alexander Blair, CTO of Parler. a publication on the service.
Speak and Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
WATCH: Apple withdraws Talking from the app store amid crackdown on violent messages
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