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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

#61

Post by jf- »

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #56
jf- wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If they aren’t open sourcing the innovations they make on top of open source software I'm not sure I'm reading your statement correctly, but it sounds like you're saying that anything not developed under a copyleft license is proprietary. If it was important for authors to receive contributions from derivative works, why would they have selected a license that doesn't require that?

I don’t see how you interpreted it that way - anything released with a proprietary license, or closed source and not released at all, is proprietary. The fact that it’s derivative of an MIT or similarly licensed work makes no difference.

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

#62

Post by smt88 »

talawahdotnet wrote: post #13
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…

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…

> 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.

This is why I recently switched to Azure. UI is a million times better, and each product seems to work. Documentation is fantastic.

AWS is full of bugs and stagnant products that overlap. It’s an absolute mess.

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

#63

Post by Dunedan »

ForHackernews wrote: post #52
talawahdotnet wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Good luck self-hosting DynamoDB and your AWS Lambdas...

There are DynamoDB Local[1] and AWS SAM CLI[2], both from AWS, which allow you to self-host DynamoDB and AWS Lambda functions. ;)

That said, I agree with your argument, but found it rather funny that you just picked two AWS services you can indeed run locally.

[1]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerg...

[2]: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-sam-cli/

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

#64

Post by xchaotic »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #27
talawahdotnet wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Given that there's special clouds just for gov agencies and now even an HQ near DC, somehow I can't see gov being able to oppose Amazon lobbying

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

#65

Post by snaky »

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…

> Maybe they're hoping that's enough for the bulk of users (and maybe it is)

They should brand it 'AWS Basics'.

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

#66

Post by SquishyPanda23 »

jf- wrote: post #61
SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they aren’t open sourcing the innovations they make on top of open source software I'm not sure I'm reading your statement correctly, but it sounds like you're saying that anything not developed under a copyleft license is proprietary. If it was important for authors to receive contributions from derivative works, why would they have selected a license that doesn't require that?

I don’t see how you interpreted it that way - anything released with a proprietary license, or closed source and not released at all, is proprietary. The fact that it’s derivative of an MIT or similarly licensed work makes no difference.

Yes, sorry, I thought you were giving it a normative interpretation, but you were just stating a fact.

I agree that your statement is correct.

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

#67

Post by talawahdotnet »

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…

UI/UX is definitely not their strong suit and CloudWatch is one of the worst offenders. I really hope they aquire a company to deliver a completely revamped observability platform in the same vein as where Stackdriver is headed. They really seem to stuggle building things in house that have a great user experience.

That being said, they excel at building things that are scalable, reliable and secure, and while you may only see that as 10% of the features, for a lot of ppl that is 80-90%, especially if data is involved. They do tend to improve their products over time as well and for better or worse I am sure a lot of those resourcing decisions are driven by data/revenue rather than how crappy the product is.

At the end of the day this allows others to continue to compete with them, which is a good thing.

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

#68

Post by TeMPOraL »

paulddraper wrote: post #37
fipple wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Software industry's evolution in a nutshell. New tools are this to old tools. SaaS are this to desktop software.

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

#69

Post by bradleyjg »

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #54
softwaredoug wrote: post #29

Earlier 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'm actually not sure how this is a failure mode of those licenses. I thought the point of permissive licenses over copyleft licenses is that you're explicitly granting companies the right to make money off your code without giving anything back.

Right. These licenses are a thin layer on top of public domain mostly to disclaim liability. The whole point is that you don’t care what anyone else does with it.

If you want a quid pro quo, then you should have been using copyleft (or something else) all along.

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

#70

Post by erikig »

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…

And not just software either. I strongly believe that this monitor-and-replicate methodology is part of why Amazon Prime Video has legs.

Any content provider that uses AWS is just helping to train the beast. That beast might not seem like a threat but it will begin to rival and eventually supplant and usurp its antecedent.

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