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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

#91

Post by mcguire »

scarface74 wrote: post #31
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.

As an aside, if you make six figures, you are rich.

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

#92

Post by cthalupa »

cdibona wrote: post #89
cthalupa wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm not strong enough in Rust or familiar enough with the Crosvm and Firecracker codebases to say, but it looks to me to have pretty majorly departed from it's progenitor at this point.

It was announced last week during reinvent.

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

#93

Post by mr_toad »

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…

> ElasticBeanstalk? ECS? Fargate? EC2 with Docker?

Historical reasons. The technology has evolved, and AWS has simply continued to add new services. Sometimes there is overlap. Perhaps if they were starting from scratch they might offer only one product.

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

#94

Post by jhall1468 »

jf- wrote: post #46
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…

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.

The innovations Amazon ads are useless outside of Amazon. Everything is about scaling open source systems inside of the Amazon ecosystem. It's not going to be usable or useful anywhere else.

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

#95

Post by nkozyra »

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 true, but 10% really isn't fair.

They have nothing that is feature complete, but if it were just 10% they wouldn't get buyin.

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

#96

Post by jhall1468 »

talawahdotnet wrote: post #55
ForHackernews wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

All the more reason for an AWS managed version of MongoDB and Knative...

The only reason that's never going to happen is because Mongo's licensing prevents it.

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

#97

Post by jhall1468 »

sharemywin wrote: post #3
mindcrime wrote: post #2

Yeah, it's getting tricky as an AWS user. Some of the stuff we're building will now be directly competing with Amazon as well. And they keep moving more and more in the direction of competing with stuff people are building on their platform. That said, the name of the game is "Co-opetition"[1]. Everybody is simultaneously competing and cooperating. Going beyond that though, it does lead us to wonder at what point it…

are there competitors to AWS that want to stay in just of cloud hosting?

Netflix does exactly that, despite being in direct competition with Prime Video. Of course, they have the advantage of being #1 in streaming TV/video.

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

#98

Post by scarface74 »

mcguire wrote: post #91
scarface74 wrote: post #31

Earlier 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.

As an aside, if you make six figures, you are rich.

I’m not disagreeing with you. But you would be surprised at how many people in the HN SV bubble think that all developers living anywhere in the country who are only making $100-$150K are living in trailers scraping by.

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

#99

Post by mr_toad »

sharemywin wrote: post #3
mindcrime wrote: post #2

Yeah, it's getting tricky as an AWS user. Some of the stuff we're building will now be directly competing with Amazon as well. And they keep moving more and more in the direction of competing with stuff people are building on their platform. That said, the name of the game is "Co-opetition"[1]. Everybody is simultaneously competing and cooperating. Going beyond that though, it does lead us to wonder at what point it…

are there competitors to AWS that want to stay in just of cloud hosting?

There are lots of tiny shops that offer fairly basic cloud services, usually based on OpenStack. E.g. https://catalystcloud.nz

Kind of like taking your car to a local shop, vs going to the dealership.

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

#100

Post by redisman »

mr_toad wrote: post #93
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…

> ElasticBeanstalk? ECS? Fargate? EC2 with Docker? Historical reasons. The technology has evolved, and AWS has simply continued to add new services. Sometimes there is overlap. Perhaps if they were starting from scratch they might offer only one product.

Also companies get stuck in their stack and then demand features that don't really make sense for the core AWS product. Like "I wish my Lambda container would live forever"
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