Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a major competitor of golem network. Golem Network could become economically unsustainable if AWS provided better and cheaper services than Golem. This is a major concern many Golem investors have in their mind.
AWS provides both CPU and GPU instance related cloud services that rivel Golem. This is why it is important to understand how competitive golem can be against AWS.
Amazon Web Services is one of the biggest cloud computing platforms worldwide with a revenue of over 25 billion dollars. Compared to that, Golem is a baby with a total market capital of less than 100 million dollars. Now, lets compare the two platforms to see which excels in what.
Decentralization
Golem is a decentralized distributed computing solution. AWS is centralized cloud computing platform. Golem wins this without any competition. However, AWS has been keeping a good eye on Blockchain companies which makes me speculate that they are interested in decentralization.
Scalability
As I have said before, AWS is a centralized solution. Because of its centralization, AWS can scale much better than Golem. For some specific cloud services, AWS scales 100s of times faster than Golem. AWS’s scalability allows it to provide a lot more services than Golem. So, AWS is the winner here.
Costs
This is where Golem will excel much better than AWS. Golem is a distributed computing solution which allows it to be deployed by anyone with no knowledge of server management. This will allow the general public to monetize their idle CPU and GPU with ease.
Since anyone with a decent system can enter golem’s provider market, it will provide price plans much better than AWS. Golem Network’s pricing is automatically set with free market economics of supply and demand.
AWS will never be able to provide services at the price Golem will provide CPU and GPU power. Because AWS costs are a lot higher. AWS has to pay engineers, system admins, marketers etc. AWS has its data centers in the United States which increase the costs further.
But the providers who will run Golem nodes won’t have much costs because they will maintain the nodes themselves. Their main cost will be the extra electricity bill. Winner, Golem.
Security
By security, I mean how securely user data is handled. AWS keeps all user data in its centralized servers. Since the data is kept in centralized servers, hackers could steal user data if AWS system is hacked. Also, AWS authorities would have to provide user details to government agencies if they were asked for it.
Golem on the other hand is distributed. It can’t be hacked easily. If the hacker wants to steal user information, he would have to hack all nodes of the network. This is impractical.
Also, governments can't breach the privacy of users in Golem. They can’t blame a single person for the data exchanged in the network. There are hundreds of Golem nodes running the entire network. They can’t take action against so many people. The best they can do is, if terror or child porn related content is shared in it, they will ask Golem node owners to blacklist those stuff. This makes user data a lot secure. Golem is the winner again.
