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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

#151

Post by xmly »

skywhopper wrote: post #47

A few thoughts. 1) This is nothing surprising. People who build businesses based largely around filling in gaps in AWS's managed services hopefully expect and plan on AWS to attempt to fill that gap if that niche truly is profitable. 2) AWS is going to build what its customers ask for. I work for a relatively big consumer of AWS services, and we have a great relationship with our customer support team, who connect us…

Confluent would be fine for sure... Usually, the open source projects would have close-sourced "enterprise feature" to make money.

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

#152

Post by zachguo »

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 so true. For example, AWS ElasticSearch, only a tiny fraction of plugins are supported, it doesn't even support gzip compression for requests and responses....

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

#153

Post by xmly »

scarface74 wrote: post #60
CrazyPyroLinux wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with crony capitalism is the crony part, not the capitalism part. So I agree that laws (usually passed by people with more self-interest than understanding) are almost never the optimal solution, by definition. Trouble is that we don't actually have a true free market, so the question becomes what is the best real-world solution, given the distortions/limits of the existing system?

I trust the capitalist a lot more than the government. Capitalist are motivated with making money the transparent way - people give them money and they give people goods and services. The government is ruled by cronyism and even worse cow tow to people’s worse instincts, superstitions, and prejudices.

True capitalist just takes your money and does not give you anything since they like money so much.

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

#154

Post by testbotlo2 »

bg24 wrote: post #150
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.

"Enterprise customers don’t give a hoot about quality, just compliance." This is a broad statement :-) Compliance is mandatory and often sales advantage for being able to sell to certain class of enterprises. IMHO, quality vs. rich feature set are different things and I see that being mixed up in the overall discussion. All AWS services exceed certain quality standards. Services are built to solve customer problems f…

Any recommendation for someone who cannot relocate but has an AWS solutions architect certification to work remotely?

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

#155

Post by tybit »

xmly wrote: post #149
coredog64 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Kinesis is based on DynamoDB, so not from scratch...

Is there any public information available about this?

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

#156

Post by yaseer »

gav wrote: post #83
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.

It’s also a result of feature-driven RFPs or similar check-the-box driven evaluation. There’s a line item for “integrated log analysis” that needs to be met, but there’s less analysis on how useful that feature may be in reality.

This.

Enterprise IT processes are filled with these kind of word-docs filled with checkboxes, and for that, AWS's featureset excels.

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

#157

Post by cammil »

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 what MVPs are all about, surely? Amazon may have vast resources, but they are not infinite. Amazon strategy seems sound from a business perspective.

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

#158

Post by erikb »

paulddraper wrote: post #37
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.

"Overwhelming mediocrity"

It seems like your qoute is a common saying but neither me nor google seems to really know it. So I would guess your downvotes come from not providing enough context about what you want to say.

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

#159

Post by inferiorhuman »

justicezyx wrote: post #118
megy wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Nope

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

#160

Post by oblio »

jhall1468 wrote: post #90
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…

A big part of that was because until recently Frontend Engineers were second class citizens at Amazon. It became easier and easier to work for a year here then move to Facebook/Google and a variety of unicorns and get a huge pay raise. Whether or not that's enough remains to be seen.

What changed?
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