Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 182 posts

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

#101

Post by coredog64 »

greyskull wrote: post #85
dana321 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Could you elaborate? Genuinely curious.

Not OP, but the problems I remember are: Inconsistent use of query parameters. Retrieving metrics for managed Elasticsearch requires more parameters than almost anything else. Inability to get arbitrary percentiles in the same query as “standard” percentiles. Documentation is awful. I found it was mostly good enough to get you to raw JSON output, and then it was on you to figure out how things worked. The delay is a killer. I understand eventual consistency is a thing, but that’s not really useful for metrics. Please, for the love of $DIETY, record them in a fast store and long term store and don’t make me wait 10-15 minutes for ELB metrics.

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

#102

Post by redisman »

snaky wrote: post #65
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'.

There are many products that they sell as PaaS that are much more beginner friendly. Elastic Beanstalk seems like a good starting point for people looking for "basics"

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

#103

Post by jf- »

jhall1468 wrote: post #94
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.

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.

That’s difficult to discuss without knowing the details, but it’s hard to believe that there isn’t anything that is of use to someone outside of amazon, even other cloud providers. There must be some efficiency gains somewhere that would benefit the original software.

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

#104

Post by coredog64 »

talawahdotnet wrote: post #51

I am personally much happier to see AWS implement managed versions of OSS like Kubernetes and Kafka, than to only see them offer their proprietary versions (Kinesis & ECS). The fact that all of these services are based on OSS software is what will help keep Amazon in check as they continue to grow and dominate, because at the end of the day if AWS starts to turn into Oracle and get abusive with their pricing/licensin…

The story I heard about Kinesis (and it could be a misunderstanding) is that Amazon originally wanted to offer managed Kafka but they couldn’t get it working with their infrastructure and started from scratch.

MSK makes sense now as Kafka has matured significantly, while Amazon has had experience in porting OSS onto their infrastructure stack (Aurora, managed ActiveMQ, EKS).

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

#105

Post by jhall1468 »

jf- wrote: post #103
jhall1468 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s difficult to discuss without knowing the details, but it’s hard to believe that there isn’t anything that is of use to someone outside of amazon, even other cloud providers. There must be some efficiency gains somewhere that would benefit the original software.

Maybe minimal benefits to other cloud providers, but hardly something you'd need in the core library. I think Amazon should contribute more to open source, but I certainly wouldn't think any company should release something that would only benefit it's competitors.

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

#106

Post by mr_toad »

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.

Utilities are regulated because they are natural monopolies, not because they are large and profitable.

AWS faces plenty of competition. There’s a reason that the pricing schedules of the major cloud vendors are so similar.

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

#107

Post by cle »

smt88 wrote: post #62
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…

> 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.

Have you thought about why?

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

#108

Post by chrisfosterelli »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #73
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.

This makes a lot of sense because most of us aren't going to work with a different company for each and every part of our infrastructure. If it's super critical it be the best, I'm going to seek out the right tool for the job. If I just need to have something, at a basic level, I'd rather work with a company I already work with.

Absolutely. I think the parent poster is massively overgeneralizing that CloudWatch is only good for "hobbyist users". Nearly every product I've worked on that's utilized AWS has sent to CloudWatch, because unless they have special needs CloudWatch doesn't meet then you might as well use it because nearly every AWS product and docs are already sending their logs there by default and it's one less infrastructure company to keep track of.

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

#109

Post by megy »

Spooky23 wrote: post #40
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.

Not true, they clearly do care about quality.

It works because if you are already using a bunch of AWS services, and then you need something that they are providing, you will give that a go first. If it doesn't provide enough, you will move to something else.

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

#110

Post by ravedave5 »

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…

API gateway is one of the worst UI's i've ever used.
Post reply on HN