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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

#121

Post by gregw2 »

chrisfosterelli wrote: post #108
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compa…

I have been super-unsatisfied with the status quo of Cloudwatch; it is not a production grade logging system if it allows you to keep zillions of streams in logs but provides A) no way to search through them all to find the last time you had a certain error containing a certain string (grep -r -i on EFS plain text logs is better than Cloudwatch!), and B) no way to trend specific errors/issues over time.

It does seem like as of last week's announcement they are starting to try to fix this. I was annoyed we had to log stuff to both Cloudwatch and Splunk to try to get decent logging.

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

#122

Post by shostack »

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…

I've often wondered this about any tech company that provides infrastructure, analytics, or marketing/advertising tech. If they get customers who compete with another of their businesses, what exists to protect customers physically, technically, or legally?

Seems like a great way to get paid for competitors to do market validation and then swoop in and clean up.

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

#123

Post by clubm8 »

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), but from what I've seen, if you want to do anything serious, you still have to use a third-party.

Or is it that they hope people would rather get everything from 1 vendor even if it's sub par?

I've noticed for example, that Prime Video and Music are inferior Netflix and Spotify. But I could see myself, if I wanted to tighten my belt, dropping the latter two to save some monthly fees.

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

#124

Post by mbesto »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #115
mbesto wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

> There isn't going to be a "changing of the guard" like what happened with IBM, Sun, etc...

Said the same people when those companies changed the guard of predecessors. Don't you remember the time when people thought Walmart and IBM were infallible?

> Trust me I have first hand experience here.

Trust me, I can cite billions of dollars that have bets (with real money) that say otherwise.

> My point is that you can't make a company today that will beat Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple or Microsoft.

You wanna bet on that? Guess what? You can! Do you have all of your net worth tied up in Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft stock? If not, then your hard stance on the matter is pretty empty.

> The "agility" of a startup, which itself isn't unique anymore, doesn't get you to scale faster than these companies anymore.

Since when?

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

Bought yes. This is definitely a problem, but for other reasons than your original argument (this is bad for startups)...but I think you just proved my point - you can get bought (for lots of $$ mind you) if you compete.

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

#125

Post by oh-kumudo »

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…

I think you would be surprised to see how the enterprise see simplicity as an important part of defining quality.

Having to manage across multiple different system vendors is not a trivial task, if AWS offers a half baked, yet good enough solution, the customers at least will be willing to give it a try.

Ultimately, the competitiveness of your service shouldn't be defined as whether Amazon choose to compete with you or not. If it is indeed the case, then that is something you need to rethink how to position yourself in the market.

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

#126

Post by oh-kumudo »

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.

Amazon isn't good at open sourcing stuff, I am 100% with you.

But there is more to this as well. AWS is a huge ecosystem by itself, a lot their services intertwined with each other, simply open source DynamoDB isn't enough without open sourcing the networking/storage functionality that is probably provided by other services.

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

#127

Post by taf2 »

softwaredoug wrote: post #18

Amazon will probably go broad, not deep. And that can be (and is) leveraged by the right companies. The trick will be differentiating within that space. Take hosted search - AWS Elasticsearch for example doesn’t necessarily prevent companies like Bonsai, Elastic, or Searchstax from standing out for the right use cases. Most importantly these companies can provide a lot of high end support and combine with other indus…

Broad at first but nothing but time prevents them from going deep

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

#128

Post by oh-kumudo »

softwaredoug wrote: post #29
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.

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 am quite on fence about this topic. I think the best way for Amazon to do is to make contributions to the OSS organizations that helps them making so much money, if they choose not to give their source code back to the community.

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

#129

Post by HillaryBriss »

darawk wrote: post #14

Aka the "Apple app store" and "Trader Joes" model of competition: Build a platform for other people to innovate on top of, then steal their best ideas after you've validated that they work well on your own platform.

trying to see how this is the Trader Joe's model.

i thought what Trader Joe's did was find food makers that sell products at other retailers (e.g. Naked Juice, sold for example at at Whole Foods) and then negotiate a deal with that same food maker to supply that same product to TJ's under the store label and at a lower price.

if I'm not mistaken, TJ's also develops its own product concepts (e.g. Thai Chili Cashew Nuts or their Winter blend coffee) in conjunction with some outside food makers and sells those in its TJ's stores too.

but, I'd be interested in finding some examples of where TJ's basically ripped off one of their own supplier's ideas and had it made by someone else for their store label. interesting stuff!

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

#130

Post by manigandham »

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.

DynamoDB is different from their published paper, which is mostly about designing a highly available key/value system that can be run on top of any other datastore. The paper does mention MySQL as a storage option.

The recent MySQL info comes from this 2016 thread on DynamoDB storing empty strings: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13170746

Confirmed by this comment specifically: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13173927

The latest 2018 ReInvent deep dive on DynamoDB doesn't reveal anything but still fits if mysql is powering the storage nodes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvBR71D0nAQ

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