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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

#31

Post by scarface74 »

polskibus wrote: post #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.

It kills me that a website full of well paid people in IT who all benefit from the free market always cry for regulation.

I guess you don’t realize how many people in middle America would love to “tax the rich” and if you’re making six figures “they” consider you rich.

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

#32

Post by brunoborges »

softwaredoug wrote: post #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 indus…

The challenge is to convince customers to pay premium for services/products from i.e. Bonsai/Elastic/etc than to use a general purpose, darn cheap, Cloud-based offering.

Amazon scales. Niche does not.

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

#33

Post by maxxxxx »

scarface74 wrote: post #26
cddotdotslash wrote: post #22

The 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 fo…

In a lot of companies you simply don't get the time to study things. I am right now working on porting a project to the cloud that was previously supported (and fucked up) by our IT department but it's hard to do it right. Ths director has declared that AWS is best and there is a lot of pressure to show something soon or the move to cloud may get cancelled.

There is no way to get something really that way but getting away from IT is already worth it even if the result is still not very good.

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

#34

Post by fipple »

cddotdotslash wrote: post #22

The 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…

This is not unique, it is the “integrated” vs “best of breed” offering. It’s like the oldest business school IT case. Amazon isn’t trying to sell the best anything, they’re selling one spot where you can get everything you need even if some of it is crappy.

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

#35

Post by talawahdotnet »

amasad wrote: post #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.

I fully agree that AWS should do a better job of contributing back to OSS communities both in terms of code, money and man hours, however I don't think most ppl appreciate that a lot of AWS' secret sauce just doesn't make sense to open source even if they wanted to.

They build their own custom nitro ASICs to integrate with KVM, for networking, storage, security, etc. That code doesn't make sense anywhere but AWS. They build things in ways that are tightly integrated with their internal systems and at a scale that few have experience with.

Take their new Envoy based service mesh for example, I really do hope that they make meaningful contributions back to the main project, but I also suspect they will doing lots of custom integration with their own hardware and internal network that will never make sense to support in an OSS project. Who knows, their Annapurna Labs divsion might even be building a custom card that includes Envoy functionality.

As to them being known for destroying OSS businesses I am drawing a blank there, can you provide some examples?

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

#36

Post by benologist »

softwaredoug wrote: post #29
amasad wrote: post #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.

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.

Amazon sell thousands of things under their own brands that they cherry-picked from their vendors' products and sales data. It is unlikely to matter if your software is open source, it just means making an alternative which they've already done for everything from chairs to Java.

If they're going to compete on $1.28 shower hooks there's no proprietary SaaS with millions in MRR on AWS that will be too hard to copy.

https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics/b?node=10112675011

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

#37

Post by paulddraper »

fipple wrote: post #34
cddotdotslash wrote: post #22

The 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…

This is not unique, it is the “integrated” vs “best of breed” offering. It’s like the oldest business school IT case. Amazon isn’t trying to sell the best anything, they’re selling one spot where you can get everything you need even if some of it is crappy.

"Overwhelming mediocrity"

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

#38

Post by mbesto »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #5

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…

> Terrifying times out there for starting a software company.

- High free cash flow businesses that other traditional industries salivate over

- Unlimited rapid scalability

- Virtually no up front computing costs and virtually elastically tied to usage growth

- Limited vendor lock-in

Yes, truly terrifying. /s

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

#39

Post by talawahdotnet »

softwaredoug wrote: post #29
amasad wrote: post #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.

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.

I really hope not, the fact that all of these services are based on OSS software is what will help keep Amazon in check as they grow, because at the end of the day if AWS starts to turn into Oracle and get abusive with their pricing/licensing then the customer has a lot more leverage to move to another cloud or self host.

To me, the fact that AWS is basing all their services OSS is a good thing for consumers. The thought of it all being proprietary is what would scare me.

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

#40

Post by Spooky23 »

cddotdotslash wrote: post #22

The 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…

Amazon’s goal with this is to check the boxes. Enterprise customers don’t give a hoot about quality, just compliance.
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