This is an ongoing trend. Same thing is happening right now with Twilio with their Flex offering competing with longtime customers such as Talkdesk.
Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers
41–50 of 182 posts
Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I feel your pain. I was the dev lead at a company and responsible for a decently complex new green field project. They decided to “move to the cloud” at the time I didn’t know anything about AWS and the “consultants” that were brought in only knew networking and the best they could help us do is a “lift and shift”. I was neither given the time to research, given good consultants that knew anything about the development and Devops portions of AWS or given the access to a dev account to experiment and do proof of concepts.
So so did everything like I would do on prem with a bunch of VMs.
I asked them to set up a dev, qa, uat, and production subnet. All with multiple VMs.
I used 7 VMs for Hashicorp’s Consul, 7 for Nomad, and 7 for Mongo. (1 for each non production environment and a cluster of 3 for production.) I also used Fabio. Between all of that I had my configuration key/value store, service discovery, job scheduling (Nomad), and data store. I also had build boxes for Team Foundation Server (or whatever MS is calling thier hosted TFS version these days with local agents.)
It wasn’t until after I was getting ready to leave the company that I realized how dumb this setup was for an AWS hosted solution. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t have done too much differently today for a self hosted solution.
I left the company, self demoted to an individual contributor role at a smaller company that was “cloud native” and I spent the next year learning AWS inside and out and taking advantage of reimbursements for certifications.
I’m still at the company now, but when and if so do decide to leave, I’m. It going back to being an architect for a company. Consulting is way more lucrative.
Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers
#43There 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
- No personnel, pay/benefits, recruiting or technological advantage over FAANG
- No speed to scale advantages over FAANG
- No rapid scalability outside of a FAANG owned platform
- No advantage in new/exiting/upcoming technologies or verticals that FAANG doesn't already have projects in
All the advantages you identify also reside natively inside FAANG, while they have no barriers to scale, with a larger sales force and more easily integrated platform.
Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers
#44This 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.
So it's ok to regulate telephony companies and cry out when they oppose net neutrality but it's just rage against the rich when people decry AMZN or MSFT that build the same services that their customers previously built on their infrastructure? It would be easy to make them decide - you either provide raw compute or you provide specialized P/SaaS (databases, etc.). Sure you could own two companies (IaaS and P/SaaS), but you would have to let other P/S on your Infra, without prefering anyone else. Result? Less vendor lock-in because of forced standarization between layers.
Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers
#45I dont fully agree, as others noted by here, there are plenty of products that compete with others and co-exist, for example terraform.
There are some things though that I bet their customers are asking badly, take for example the Transit Gateway, one might thing that it is trying to put out the vendors that users use for their Transit VPC, for example Cisco, Fortinet, Palo alto to name a few, however, the Transit VPC is ugly, tough to maintain and cant scale, yes, the vendors make big money from licences for Transit VPC, but the need of a native service was there, the vendors will still sell licences, just not for Transit VPC, they will be able to focus on other parts that AWS dont prodive a lot.
Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tho…
If they aren’t open sourcing the innovations they make on top of open source software, then it is proprietary software.
I think amazon are unlikely to give up any competitive advantage they are not forced to give up.
Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers
#47A few thoughts. 1) This is nothing surprising. People who build businesses based largely around filling in gaps in AWS's managed services hopefully expect and plan on AWS to attempt to fill that gap if that niche truly is profitable.
2) AWS is going to build what its customers ask for. I work for a relatively big consumer of AWS services, and we have a great relationship with our customer support team, who connect us to the engineering teams building the tools we use, and without fail down to the team, they are always very interested in how they can better serve our needs and build products we want to use. And if they hear "Kinesis is fine for some things, but we really want to also do Kafka" from enough people, they will build a Kafka managed service, just like they built ElasticSearch service, a Redis service, an RDS. And why shouldn't they?
3) For customers, AWS's cost model is far better than most managed cloud services. I don't know anything about Confluent's managed Kafka offering, but having everything metered in tiny increments is a huge reduction in the barrier to entry. If we want to build on a managed Kafka platform, but we want to start slow and grow as we need, it's so much better to be able to just spin up a tiny version to try things out, tear it down, take a break for other priorities, then come back with more confidence and more experience and iterate into building something real. Whereas too many cloud services require a huge lock-in agreement up front before you can get any support, or often any service.
And it's not like the lock-in is necessary. These companies could be integrating their services to allow potential customers to leverage their AWS infrastructure. There's no reason these third parties can't use IAM credentials for authentication, and publish their services to customers over PrivateLink, a tool AWS built for explicitly this sort of purpose--to enable cloud providers to provide tight integrations with their shared customer base.
4) In terms of product quality, I don't think Confluent et al have anything to be worried about. AWS "competes" with Dropbox, technically, but is WorkDocs really serious competition? AWS's managed services have their place, but you can't use RDS to replace the flexibility and scale you can achieve by running PostgreSQL yourself. Their managed ElasticSearch and Redis products are okay, but ultimately very rigid, and nonsensical to use beyond mid-range scale. Their managed k8s service is something of a joke at this point (though I'm sure it will get better). If Confluent is truly offering a strong managed Kafka product, they will be just fine.
5) In fact, I suspect Confluent will get a lot more customers as a result of this announcement, as management at hundreds of mid-sized companies will now be convinced thanks to the AWS marketing that this Kafka thing their engineers have been begging for for years must be really key now, but they'll figure out how the AWS version doesn't quite live up and will end up being really expensive to scale to their company's needs. Then they'll look a little deeper and find Confluent. So I hope their marketing and sales teams are ready for the influx. It's coming.
Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers
#48That'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. The…
What about DynamoDB? I'm pretty sure they could open source a lot but they just don't want. Google had the same pathetic excuse when asked why they don't open source appengine or datastore.
Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers
#49This 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.
The problem with crony capitalism is the crony part, not the capitalism part. So I agree that laws (usually passed by people with more self-interest than understanding) are almost never the optimal solution, by definition. Trouble is that we don't actually have a true free market, so the question becomes what is the best real-world solution, given the distortions/limits of the existing system?
Re: Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So it's ok to regulate telephony companies and cry out when they oppose net neutrality but it's just rage against the rich when people decry AMZN or MSFT that build the same services that their customers previously built on their infrastructure? It would be easy to make them decide - you either provide raw compute or you provide specialized P/SaaS (databases, etc.). Sure you could own two companies (IaaS and P/SaaS),…
The cell phone carriers have never been regulated by net neutrality and I’m okay with that. There are four major national carriers, if one carrier is customer hostile, another carrier will pick up the slack. We saw just that with the rise of T-mobile.
Most people only have one company offering terrestrial internet. So yeah that should be regulated. It’s considered a natural monopoly.
Companies don’t have to depend on the major cloud providers - but there are at least three major ones and IBM and Oracle are making a play. There are even smaller providers that just host VMs like Linode. I can easily imagine Linode partnering with companies to provide managed services.
On top of that cloud providers hosting servers is dwarfed by the number of companies who are using colos. There are plenty of business opportunities out there.
So no, I don’t think that you should have regulation to protect a business model. Government regulation and monopoly regulation in particular was meant to prevent harm to consumers.
But you really trust the government to have sensible technology regulation?