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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

#81

Post by wmf »

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.

Yeah, what has failed is the idea that licenses are all basically the same and thus you should choose whatever license all the cool kids are using lately. We're seeing that licenses matter and you can't choose a permissive license and later complain about "the spirit of open source".

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

#83

Post by gav »

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.

It’s also a result of feature-driven RFPs or similar check-the-box driven evaluation.

There’s a line item for “integrated log analysis” that needs to be met, but there’s less analysis on how useful that feature may be in reality.

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

#84

Post by manigandham »

thefounder wrote: post #48
talawahdotnet wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nobody is entitled to proprietary development by these companies. Amazon wrote the Dynamo paper which gave us Cassandra/Scylla and Google produced BigTable which was replicated by HBase.

Releasing stuff isn't simple, the hosted services only work because of the rest of their infrastructure. Writing about the tech is usually the best way to spur clean open-source versions that we can all use.

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

#85

Post by greyskull »

dana321 wrote: post #75
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…

Somebody noticed! I thought it was just me. Even their API interfaces are dated and cumbersome to use.

Could you elaborate? Genuinely curious.

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

#86

Post by kemitchell »

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.

You might be interested in this work: https://blog.licensezero.com/2018/11/24/parity-5.0.0.html

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

#87

Post by kemitchell »

sciurus wrote: post #59
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 don't think the existing permissive to copyleft spectrum is what matters here. MongoDB, for example, was previously licensed under the AGPL, which is the most aggressive OSI-approved copyleft license I can think of, but they still felt the need to adopt a controversial new license targeted at cloud providers. For another example, Redis Labs didn't decide to adopt a stronger copyleft license for their extensions, th…

See RPL 1.5, OSL 3.0, QFPL.

https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/10/24/How-to-Speak-Copyl...

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

#88

Post by manigandham »

Dunedan wrote: post #63
ForHackernews wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

These are meant for anything more than dev testing though. All the big clouds offer various dev/local versions of their hosted products that are usually just wrappers around sqlite or rocksdb to emulate the interfaces.

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

#89

Post by cdibona »

cthalupa wrote: post #79
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.

Amazon just open sourced the hypervisor used for Lambda and Fargate ( https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker ) When the Spectre/Meltdown hit, Amazon also open sourced the mitigation used for the AWS version of Xen ( http://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/xsa254/README.vixen ) If you search the Linux git commits for people with @amazon emails, you'll find contributions, bug fixes, etc. I don't think it's fair to say t…

Firecracker is a forked copy of Crosvm. Looks like they did so late last year?

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

#90

Post by jhall1468 »

talawahdotnet wrote: post #67
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 ma…

A big part of that was because until recently Frontend Engineers were second class citizens at Amazon. It became easier and easier to work for a year here then move to Facebook/Google and a variety of unicorns and get a huge pay raise.

Whether or not that's enough remains to be seen.

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