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Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers

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Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers

#11

There is nothing that prevents AWS from using it's own systems as business intelligence for creating their own competitive products. Think about it like "store brand" software. If people seem to be installing docker on 40% of AWS instances, then evolving Amazon ECS to include an Amazon branded Docker clone, effectively replacing Docker, is a no-brainer. Seems like this is the way they are going. No need to acquire co…

It should fix itself eventually, either companies will choose to use Google or Microsoft rather than AWS or the government will smack AWS with monopoly laws. The main concern there is that Bezos has become so entrenched in DC with the washington post, DOD cloud contract, and new headquarters that it's hard to tell if we can rely on the government to do anything

Honestly I doubt it.

1. If Amazon is providing a service that is as good or easier to implement than others, people don't care enough about competition or open markets to decide based on that.

2. From the govt perspective, I'm on the front lines of the DoD cloud discussions and I can tell you that even though we don't want a single provider, and hopefully I can push hard to ensure we have multiple providers, Amazon has the mindshare in the govt and growing.

Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers

#13

There is nothing that prevents AWS from using it's own systems as business intelligence for creating their own competitive products. Think about it like "store brand" software. If people seem to be installing docker on 40% of AWS instances, then evolving Amazon ECS to include an Amazon branded Docker clone, effectively replacing Docker, is a no-brainer. Seems like this is the way they are going. No need to acquire co…

They don't really need to do anything sneaky to figure out what to build next. They generally build things that their customers are banging down their doors asking them to build.

The main difference with AWS vs Azure or Google is that they have been focused on the space longer and they have really optimized the rate at which they can build out a new scalable, reliable, secure, mananged service.

Sure, the UI/UX is usually not great, and the documentation is imperfect and there are features missing, but they get the hard things right, they charge per second/hour/GB, and they improve over time.

Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers

#15
That's why I think MongoDB's new license which prevents AWS etc from hosting as a service without open sourcing makes sense (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18229452). Amazon barely contributes anything back to the community and is known for destroying OSS businesses.

Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers

#16

Yeah, it's getting tricky as an AWS user. Some of the stuff we're building will now be directly competing with Amazon as well. And they keep moving more and more in the direction of competing with stuff people are building on their platform. That said, the name of the game is "Co-opetition"[1]. Everybody is simultaneously competing and cooperating. Going beyond that though, it does lead us to wonder at what point it…

are there competitors to AWS that want to stay in just of cloud hosting?

Yeah, traditional hosting companies such OVH...there was rackspace as well but it's gone now.

Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers

#17
post #7

I would imagine this should be a primary concern for a lot of companies operating in Google, Microsofts, and Amazon's cloud. You are dealing with companies that have the power and money to become your main competitor overnight, and you don't know what kind of business intelligence they are gaining from you being on their hardware, and if there is espionage going on with your software and service. How honest are they…

You don't need any espionage to implement and release the new Amazon Kafka product. Kafka is an open source package after all.

Profiting from any marginal gain from such espionage would be deterred by the huge reputational risk for AWS, were they caught.

Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers

#18
Amazon will probably go broad, not deep. And that can be (and is) leveraged by the right companies.

The trick will be differentiating within that space. Take hosted search - AWS Elasticsearch for example doesn’t necessarily prevent companies like Bonsai, Elastic, or Searchstax from standing out for the right use cases. Most importantly these companies can provide a lot of high end support and combine with other industry focused products and services (like Elastic XPack) that Amazon doesn’t provide for the niches these companies work within.

We probably need to assume Amazon will host X thing and work to find the niches deeper in X that need to be served.

Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers

#19
post #7

I would imagine this should be a primary concern for a lot of companies operating in Google, Microsofts, and Amazon's cloud. You are dealing with companies that have the power and money to become your main competitor overnight, and you don't know what kind of business intelligence they are gaining from you being on their hardware, and if there is espionage going on with your software and service. How honest are they…

My thoughts exactly. Also makes those who were a bit cloud-skeptical look a little less like the Luddites they were portrayed as. And I note that out of the handful of companies...

that I know well enough to comment on

that have a culture where protecting their intellectual property is important

that wanted "cloud"

that could afford to set up their own on-premises cloud

...all of them did so.

Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers

#20
This is why public cloud companies should be more regulated like telephony companies are, ie like utilities. They give you broadband but not necessarily try to sell you 15 kinds of database engines, or trying to build the same things other businesses try to build using their lines.
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