Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services.
CNBC
Getting kicked off Amazon Web Services is rare, but it has huge ramifications.
It happened this week when Amazon dropped Parler, a social network that gained traction from conservatives after Twitter banned President Donald Trump and housed content encouraging violence. Parler filed suit against Amazon in federal district court in an effort to prevent Amazon from suspending Parler’s account, and Amazon pushed back, asking the court to deny Parler’s motion.
The incident demonstrates a kind of power that Amazon uses almost uniquely, as so many companies rely on it to provide computers and data storage. According to estimates by technology research firm Gartner, Amazon owned 45% of cloud infrastructure in 2019, more than any other company. The app survived without being listed in Apple’s and Google’s app stores, but by being banned from Amazon’s cloud, Parler is absent from the web for days.
Parler’s engineering team had built software that drew from Amazon Web Services computing resources, and the company was in talks with Amazon about adopting its own AWS database and artificial intelligence services, the company said in a district court indictment Wednesday. .
It would take a while to figure out how to run similar functions on Parler’s own servers or any cloud other than AWS. And in Parler’s case, time is of the essence, because it came when the service caught attention and new users followed the Trump ban on Twitter.
Parler’s engineers could learn to use other computing infrastructure, or the company could hire developers who already have that knowledge. But because no cloud provider is as popular as Amazon, people proficient in, say, Oracle’s cloud are not as easy to find as those who know how to build on AWS.
The warnings were there
The speed at which Amazon traded shouldn’t come as a shock. Companies have been publishing details of their deals with Amazon for years warning of these kinds of sudden shutdowns.
In 2010, DNA sequencing company Complete Genomics said that “an interruption of services by Amazon Web Services, on whom we rely to provide completed genomic data to our customers, would result in our customers not receiving their data on time.”
Gaming company Zynga warned of how its AWS foundation could soon disappear when it submitted the prospectus for its first public offering in 2011. At the time, AWS organized half of the traffic for Zynga’s games, such as FarmVille and Words with Friends, the company said. . .
AWS may terminate the agreement without cause by giving 180 days written notice, and may terminate the agreement with 30 days written notice, including for material failure or breach of the agreement by us that we fail to do within the 30-day period, ”Zynga said.
In fact, AWS may immediately terminate or suspend its agreement with a customer under certain circumstances, much like it did with Wikileaks in 2010, indicating violations of AWS Terms of Service.
Parler started using AWS in 2018, long after the Wikileaks incident and the first corporate revelations about the possibility of cloud outages.
When AWS told Parler that it planned to suspend Parler’s AWS account, it said that Parler had repeatedly violated the terms, including by not owning or controlling the rights to the content.
Over the course of several weeks, AWS Parler warned of instances of user content encouraging violence, Amazon said in a lawsuit. More of that content surfaced after protesters stormed the Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, interrupting Congressional confirmation of the Electoral College’s results of the 2020 presidential election. AWS said Parler was not doing enough to quickly remove that kind of information from its social network.
Parler could have protected himself better. Major AWS customers can sign up for more comprehensive agreements, which gives more customers the time to comply if they break the rules.
Gartner analyst Lydia Leong explained this difference in a blog post: “Thirty days is a common time frame specified as a healing period in contracts (and is the healing period in the AWS standard Enterprise Agreement), but click-through agreements for cloud providers (such as the AWS Customer Agreement) do not normally have a healing period, allowing immediate action to be taken at the sole discretion of the provider, ”she wrote.
Other cloud providers have their own terms and conditions that their customers must follow. However, AWS now has millions of customers and controls a greater share of the cloud infrastructure market than any other provider. As a result, many organizations can be exposed to the kind of treatment that Parler has undergone, rare as it may be, if they don’t behave in accordance with Amazon’s standards.
Parler recognized the downsides of a cloud provider, but in the end the flexibility that clouds provide was too compelling to ignore. “I am personally very anti-cloud and anti-centralization, although AWS has its place for high-burst traffic,” Alexander Blair, Parler’s chief of technology, wrote. a post on the service.
Parler and Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
WATCH: Apple pulls Parler from the App Store amid crackdown on violent messaging