Live data from Hacker News

When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the Competition

gkogan.co

61–70 of 92 posts

Re: When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the Competition

#61
post #31

While AWS has ruffled a bunch of feathers with their Elasticsearch and Kafka managed offerings which can be easily construed as attempts to steam roll the respective open source-first entities, I am actually quite impressed by the mechanism that Azure has employed with Azure Managed Applications: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/managed-applications/... . Hashicorp recently announced their collaboration with Az…

I am not. Microsoft was always a partner driven company. Most of their sales are through their partners, and they have learned to respect that. They have also learned to build platform, unlike MacOS/Android, windows will never pull APIs out form under you.

And windows basically sucks, in no small part due to the historical baggage it must carry. That and it’s not nix

Re: When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the Competition

#63

> Think Twice Before Open-Sourcing I think it is a problem that it is very hard to monetize open source infrastructure libraries. In the past, you could try to do consulting or else offer paid hosting. Now with the cloud providers doing "zero management" hosting of open source libraries, both those avenues have been seriously curtailed. Honestly, it seems like if you are the primary author of a popular open source li…

These days, I wouldn't open source anything other than a small hobby project or utility library/app.

Re: When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the Competition

#64
This is a good post from a16z -

https://a16z.com/2019/10/04/commercializing-open-source/

"As software has eaten the world, open source is eating software.

Today, almost every major technology company, from Facebook to Google, is written on the backs of open source software. Increasingly, these companies are building their own open source projects as well – Airbnb, for example, has more than 30 open source projects, and Google more than 2000!

In the future, the virtuous cycle will continue. Technologically, AI, open source data, and block chain are some examples of emerging innovations. The next generation of business models may include ad-supported OSS, as when a large proprietary enterprise supports open source projects; data-driven revenue; and crypto tokens, which monetize blockchain.

I believe Open Source 3.0 will expand how we think of and define open source businesses. Open source will no longer be RedHat, Elastic, Databricks, and Cloudera; it will be – at least in part – Facebook, Airbnb, Google, and any other business that has open source as a key part of its stack. When we look at open source this way, then the renaissance underway may only be in its infancy. The market and possibilities for open source software are far greater than we have yet realized."

Re: When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the Competition

#65
post #9

If you're doing anything ML related your best bet is to niche down and solve a very narrow problem for a specific industry / market segment. Building generic AI tooling sounds great but rarely solves anyones problems.

As an ML practitioner in a large ecommerce company, I totally agree. When I evaluate third party tools, 99% have no use at all for me. Things like Algolia or Rekognition or Clarifai. Even Sagemaker and Fargate are mostly not useful to me as my company can easily operate its own k8s platform. Open source tools for model building are great and a small team of engineers can write whatever odds & ends that aren’t covered…

How do you train your models? With Databricks (which is just a nice notebook UI for Apache Spark) I don't have to spend time setting up VMs and libraries for the distributed training.

Re: When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the Competition

#66
post #31

While AWS has ruffled a bunch of feathers with their Elasticsearch and Kafka managed offerings which can be easily construed as attempts to steam roll the respective open source-first entities, I am actually quite impressed by the mechanism that Azure has employed with Azure Managed Applications: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/managed-applications/... . Hashicorp recently announced their collaboration with Az…

How does Azure's offering differ from GCP's fully integrated OSS products? https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/open-source/bringing-...

[deleted]

Re: When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the Competition

#67
post #62

Terrible blog post, they completely forget to mention Mesos which owned the orchestration market before Docker Swarm and Kubernetes

Yikes, that’s a little harsh considering the good discussion going on before and after your comment.

There is good discussion but there is a lot of hyperbole, how many companies can you name that have been killed by these hyperscale cloud providers?

Many seem to be doing well: https://a16z.com/2019/10/04/commercializing-open-source/

Some just may not be worth their oversized valuations in the long run but made choices to be valued much larger than their actual worth.

Re: When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the Competition

#68
post #60

I wonder if this is a driving force behind why Cognitect has kept Datomic closed source. I’ve seen people rally against Datomic more than once for that reason, but honestly, how can you open-source something truly unique and monetize without a large risk of cloud provider hijacking.

RICH HICKEY: To those who think that Datomic ought to be open source: We don't see a viable economic model there.

The source is an r/clojure flamewar which I'm not going to link.

Re: When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the Competition

#69
post #9

If you're doing anything ML related your best bet is to niche down and solve a very narrow problem for a specific industry / market segment. Building generic AI tooling sounds great but rarely solves anyones problems.

As an ML practitioner in a large ecommerce company, I totally agree. When I evaluate third party tools, 99% have no use at all for me. Things like Algolia or Rekognition or Clarifai. Even Sagemaker and Fargate are mostly not useful to me as my company can easily operate its own k8s platform. Open source tools for model building are great and a small team of engineers can write whatever odds & ends that aren’t covered…

> notebooks are universally poor development environments even for the very tasks they are advertised

unnecessarily dismissive, grandstanding.. Bravado of the rejection, not supported at all

Rich-content Notebooks tell a story; well-worn Notebooks are a familiar context for experiment and viz.

Post reply on HN