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Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers
21–30 of 182 posts
Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers
#22The trend I've noticed is that AWS makes a lot of very half-baked services that appear to compete with third-parties, but provide about 10% of the features and usability. Maybe they're hoping that's enough for the bulk of users (and maybe it is), but from what I've seen, if you want to do anything serious, you still have to use a third-party.
Take CloudWatch for example. It's technically "competing" with Splunk, Datadog, and other logging/metrics services. But the usability of CloudWatch is beyond poor - it's slow, the UI is terrible, and has tons of limitations. It provides just barely enough usability that hobbyist users can use it. But most serious businesses will revert to Splunk or Sumo Logic or Datadog.
Another issue I have with AWS is that they simply provide too many ways to do the same thing. I want to run a container. Should I use ElasticBeanstalk? ECS? Fargate? EC2 with Docker? I've been using AWS for years, so I get the subtle differences, but some users just want to click a button and be done with it, which is where third-parties can excel.
Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
ovh and hertzner are also vastly undercutting amazon in the EU.
Amazon is crazy expensive. especially if you consider the far lower labour costs in most of the EU.
Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers
#24On the hand, AWS’s largest customer is Netflix. Amazon’s Prime Video is a direct competitor.
Reposting an earlier link.
http://scripting.com/stories/2007/04/04/coexistingWithPlatfo...
Sometimes developers choose a niche that’s either directly in the path of the vendor, or even worse, on the roadmap of the vendor. In those cases, they don’t really deserve our sympathy.”
Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers
#25Coopretition is nothing new - look at every utility, telecom, cableco, and others - its a normal way of existing when markets and technologies are heavily interlinked.
Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers
#26The trend I've noticed is that AWS makes a lot of very half-baked services that appear to compete with third-parties, but provide about 10% of the features and usability. Maybe they're hoping that's enough for the bulk of users (and maybe it is), but from what I've seen, if you want to do anything serious, you still have to use a third-party. Take CloudWatch for example. It's technically "competing" with Splunk, Data…
Another issue I have with AWS is that they simply provide too many ways to do the same thing. I want to run a container. Should I use ElasticBeanstalk? ECS? Fargate? EC2 with Docker? I've been using AWS for years, so I get the subtle differences, but some users just want to click a button and be done with it, which is where third-parties can excel.
Or pay overpriced “Implementation Consultants”. I have no sympathy for people who don’t take the time to learn the subtleties of the platform they choose to use.
On the other hand, I’ll gladly charge them a nice hourly rate to help them.
Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers
#27There 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 usu…
Agreed. They just do a really good job of providing services and support. That's the point though. If people are happy with them, then there's no need for consumers to change and they won't change just because "we don't want to work with Amazon."
Arguably though the US Government (as a customer) has a role to actively encourage a competitive market.
Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers
#28This is absolutely correct, they have done for a long time. They look at what their customers build, see what grows a lot, and then build (often a shitty version) themselves. They don't even pretend to do otherwise, and everybody in the space knows it.
I was chatting to the CEO of a cloud product who went to reinvent and was relieved to find out that Amazon had not launched a competing product. But we both know it's a "when, not if" situation.
Part of the reason my new startup is on GCP. I don't want to AWS to have any of our internal growth numbers.
Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers
#29That'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.
I wonder with Amazon if we’re seeing a failure mode of Apache and BSD licenses, and if the future OSS might trend back towards more aggressively being copy left... or some place in between.
Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers
#30AWS’s managed FTP service too
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