I haven't used many of the new AWS services. Someone tell me, what's the quality level? I'll be surprised if all the new AWS stuff works that well given how divided their focus must be now.
Part of it is the cereal business model. You introduce more flavors not because they are going to sell well or to increase volume, but just to take shelf space at the supermarket away from your competitors. In this case the shelf space is mindshare, media coverage and "feature coverage" in researcher's market comparisons.
AWS makes me wonder what the future of open source infrastructure will look like. I'm sure they contribute back at least a little but providers have little reason to contribute back the distributed/scale modifications they make. They can take any project with a friendly license and essentially siphon away its future user base by turning it into a service. It's basically what a lot of open core companies do but it's d…
If I were developing a new project I'd probably go with an AGPL style license. It just seems appropriate for anything that could be hosted. Not sure what the downsides are.
If your software was AGPL, we wouldn't use it, and hence wouldn't contribute patches. Plenty of other companies would be the same.
If you're interested in distributed system tracing there's a lot going on. As a starting point, I would recommend reading Google's paper on their project "Dapper." [1] It's essentially the core of most distributed tracing systems. At least those I've encountered. There's a lot of tooling out there that take their cues from Dapper. I've recently been looking into integrating OpenZipkin[2] with our systems. I see at as…
Those are the comments I come here for. I was reading this and dreaded the lock-in. Thanks for pointing out sane alternatives!
AWS makes me wonder what the future of open source infrastructure will look like. I'm sure they contribute back at least a little but providers have little reason to contribute back the distributed/scale modifications they make. They can take any project with a friendly license and essentially siphon away its future user base by turning it into a service. It's basically what a lot of open core companies do but it's d…
> I'm sure they contribute back at least a little Almost from 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9358843 But gist is, Amazon employees are generally discouraged from contributing to open source at all.
I know they do a tiny bit here and there (there was a presentation here at the re:Invent conference about it that I didn't get a chance to attend) but their usage of it internally probably dwarfs those contributions.
It makes business sense even if it's a shitty thing to do. The stronger an open source project is that provides the core functionality that your managed service provides the easier it is for a competitor to build the same thing. Amazon isn't as cutthroat as Oracle but they're certainly much less OSS friendly than many of their competitors.
If I were developing a new project I'd probably go with an AGPL style license. It just seems appropriate for anything that could be hosted. Not sure what the downsides are.
If your software was AGPL, we wouldn't use it, and hence wouldn't contribute patches. Plenty of other companies would be the same. That might or might not be a downside to you.
As someone who writes AGPL software, I will say to most of us it isn't a downside: I would conceptialize that scenario as "your loss" and hope that my work helps give companies who are more friendly to the idea of community software at least a little bit of a competitive advantage over your company. In all seriousness: if you are intending to not contribute changes back (which is the only legitimate reason to avoid GPL variants: because you want to use someone else's work while hoarding your own), your gracious "using" of my software has absolutely no value to me...
If you're interested in distributed system tracing there's a lot going on. As a starting point, I would recommend reading Google's paper on their project "Dapper." [1] It's essentially the core of most distributed tracing systems. At least those I've encountered. There's a lot of tooling out there that take their cues from Dapper. I've recently been looking into integrating OpenZipkin[2] with our systems. I see at as…
(I WORK FOR AWS) Each service has it's own dedicated service team. I've used some (not all) of the new services and I believe there is room to improve but I didn't think they were unstable or anything like that.
I know there's no obligation to invest in services that don't make money, so please don't take this as some kind of expectation of that. A dedicated team doesn't always mean there's an equal distribution of quality and innovation. You can have a dedicated team that's so small they only have time to do bug fixes or a team with less talent/experience because everyone wants to move to teams working on the projects with…
TBH I think you have a point there: the hot new thing is serverless and lambda so everyone I know really wants to work on those teams. I see where you're coming from for sure.
There are still a lot of talented and passionate people at Amazon who want to execute on other products. The S3 team is still growing 10 years later and they're still doing (IMO) cool stuff. I'm a devangelist though so I don't always get to see the inside of every team (not enough time). I do know that we all drink the customer focused kool-aide and we genuinely believe in it. Sorry if this all sounds like marketing.