Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by chrisseaton » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 1:15 AM UTC

mbell wrote: post #77

thefounder wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> What about DynamoDB? From what I recall DynamoDB is a somewhat hacky API layer over a bunch of MySQL clusters. I'm not sure anyone would, or should, attempt to use a non-managed version of it.

Where do you recall that from? Your description doesn’t match their published paper in any way.

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

#112

Post by auslander » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 1:16 AM UTC

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…

Splunk competes not with CloudWatch, but with Elasticsearch Service, that includes Kibana.

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

#113

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 1:47 AM UTC

redisman wrote: post #102

snaky wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"

It's a take on "Amazon Basics" from their retail presence; simple/lower-quality versions that are good enough for 90% of people.

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

#114

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 1:51 AM UTC

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.

I don't think that excuse is particularly pathetic; I would be shocked if appengine can run without Borg or some equivalent, at which point open sourcing it is a lovely thought and completely worthless to everyone. It's the equivalent of open sourcing a program in a language for which all compilers are proprietary and generally not available (K comes to mind). Not literally 100% without value, but close enough.

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

#115

Post by AndrewKemendo » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 2:05 AM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #71

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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 an…

Your overall premise of "There is nothing that prevents AWS from using it's own systems as business intelligence for creating their own competitive products." is spot on. But characterizing the situation as "terrifying" seems just a little bit disingenuous. It's a double edged sword. All of the factors you mentioned are characteristics of any fortune 500 business. Are you familiar with the Innovator's dilemma? > - No…

Don't get me wrong, you can still make a niche multi-million dollar company out there in tech land and sell it off at some point. That's not my point.

My point is that you can't make a company today that will beat Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple or Microsoft. There isn't going to be a "changing of the guard" like what happened with IBM, Sun, etc...

The "agility" of a startup, which itself isn't unique anymore, doesn't get you to scale faster than these companies anymore. They will wait for you to prove the market and then blow you out of the water. Trust me I have first hand experience here.

All the channels are saturated and you'll either get bought or crushed. That's what is scary.

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

#116

Post by grogenaut » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 2:10 AM UTC

auslander wrote: post #112

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…

Splunk competes not with CloudWatch, but with Elasticsearch Service, that includes Kibana.

take a look at insights

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

#117

Post by iampims » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 2:18 AM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #111

mbell wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What about DynamoDB? From what I recall DynamoDB is a somewhat hacky API layer over a bunch of MySQL clusters. I'm not sure anyone would, or should, attempt to use a non-managed version of it.

Where do you recall that from? Your description doesn’t match their published paper in any way.

My understanding is that DynamoDB != Dynamo Paper

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

#118

Post by justicezyx » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 2:22 AM UTC

megy wrote: post #109

Spooky23 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dont you think your statement contradicts between the first sentence and the second?

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

#119

Post by apotheosis » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 2:24 AM UTC

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…

There's also EKS now, which is competing directly with ECS / Fargate I guess?

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

#120

Post by aviv » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 2:51 AM UTC

ravedave5 wrote: post #110

talawahdotnet wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Being the worst is not as bad as people think. McDonalds has the worst burgers and Taco Bell the worst tacos, yet both massively successful operations.