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AWS is not a dumb pipe

matt-rickard.com

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Re: AWS is not a dumb pipe

#31

Post by tjr225 »

wmfiv wrote: post #21
didip wrote: post #17

But it can be a dumb pipe. More and more companies prefer that. Just deploy everything on EKS and use only foundational services such as S3 and PostgreSQL Aurora. There you go: Dumb Pipes. Edit: When I say dumb, it's more like: Dumb enough so that another public cloud vendor, such as GCP or Azure, can be swapped in.

Except you’ve picked out two of the most complex and deep services as “foundational”.

Running your own Kubernetes cluster is complex and deep. Giving a yaml file to EKS and suddenly you have infrastructure is not complex at all. Its actually pretty sweet.

Re: AWS is not a dumb pipe

#32

Post by pm90 »

glogla wrote: post #28
didip wrote: post #17

But it can be a dumb pipe. More and more companies prefer that. Just deploy everything on EKS and use only foundational services such as S3 and PostgreSQL Aurora. There you go: Dumb Pipes. Edit: When I say dumb, it's more like: Dumb enough so that another public cloud vendor, such as GCP or Azure, can be swapped in.

Honestly, it should be. AWS is much better at the dumb, commodity services like s3, ec2 and rds (that are actually pretty smart) than they are at something like redshift, sagemaker or similar.

They're "good enough" for most users that might not care about super high availability, devex etc. As long as its cheap and solves a business problem, it will win.

Re: AWS is not a dumb pipe

#33

Post by glogla »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #13
rckrd wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. They missed the Snowflake opportunity by having the wrong architecture for Redshift (decoupled storage and compute). They shifted to the Snowflake model in 2019, but the damage might already be done. For other the other services I listed, the main differentiators are mainly plugins/extensibility and developer experience.

Isn’t this a bit of a moot point now though? If you’re going to pay someone for a data warehouse, you can pay AWS some money, or you can pay Snowflake a heinous amount of money, for something not significantly better? Mongo, ES and Redis all come with open source versions, which shifts the appeal back away from the AWS offerings, especially with things like Elastic Cloud for Kubernetes which has made our ES cluster b…

Snowflake is technically far superior to Redshift. The performance and features are somewhere else. Even if you pay more in operating cost (which is not always the case, especially if you count Redshift DBA salary), you get to do what you actually need to do much faster instead of fighting the platform.

Snowflake is also technically going to always be far superior to Redshift, because AWS is a follower, not a leader. Their strategy is to copy what others are doing and build a moat of "but we can do it too, and you already have other things with us".

And if you really care about operating cost, you should be running Trino+Minio or Clickhouse onprem or something as your warehouse.

Re: AWS is not a dumb pipe

#34

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

I think this over-estimates the intelligence of cloud businesses, and under-estimates the motives of paying customers.

First there's the assumption that Amazon, Microsoft, Google, "get software". This doesn't really mean anything. So you're a tech company and you know how to churn out software; so what? That doesn't mean your particular tech is better than anybody else's. Amazon alone has 70,000 engineers; they didn't snag all the good ones. If you look at their code (or try to package it for a Linux distribution), it's a hot mess. Their tech is not why they're successful. They know that software is just a tool you use to sell.

These companies' major wins were for all kinds of reasons other than their technical acumen: spinning off a new business from an already-profitable one, acquiring and integrating other businesses, or keeping a moat (sorry - "platform") around a particular market or customer base. It doesn't matter if they "get software". Just look at Google Cloud; it'll probably be sunset in 2 years. Who cares if they "get software" if they suck at acquiring customers? Apple is launching their own public cloud soon, as well as a couple other small and large companies. Will they be successful? It won't be because of their technology (they're all using the same code anyway). If you want to steal customers from Amazon, you need to sell it.

Paying customers don't care if you can see the future or are "internet native". They care if you can lower their costs and get them to market quicker, if you provide stellar support, if your product is more popular (more people know how to built with it/maintain it), if you make their life easier, and if your service appears more reliable.

And AWS knows all this. They're a savvy salesman, a reliable contractor, and an industry standard. They know how to keep and grow their business, and it isn't by reducing what they sell or focusing on a narrow market. If you're the incumbent, you sell more integrated services and diversify your business, and keep pushing until a market implodes. Then you tourniquet that part of the business and pivot. But what they'll never do is strategically refocus on some smaller business sector if it means making less money.

Re: AWS is not a dumb pipe

#35

Post by oneplane »

AWS isn't a single "thing", or perhaps, it's only a bundled brand. There are many teams, sub-companies, divisions, groups all working on their own parts. Most have to follow a similar set of rules and some attempts are made to make it cohesive, but in the end it's not a single minded entity with a single set of parameters it follows for every service offering.

You can run your stuff on AWS without ever touching compute, storage and networking yourself, and you can also run your stuff on AWS by only touching compute, storage and networking and nothing else. You can guess your risk wrong and do everything as a root user in a single account, and you can create an account vending machine in a well-architected organisation with policies in place to prevent the huge amount of footguns lying around everywhere from going off.

There are so many ways you could be using it that trying to put a single label on it seems pointless to me. Just like the only constant you can count on is 'change', the only 'proper' usage or terminology in terms of AWS is what you know, what you need, and what you ended up doing. This includes shooting yourself in the foot with CloudFormation because you accidentally thought CDKs are your friend and JavaScript was the best tasting language for your goal, or thinking that clicking around in the console would be a good way to get your department of developers up and running.

Re: AWS is not a dumb pipe

#36

Post by hnlmorg »

laurent92 wrote: post #26
quickthrower2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heroku* and DigitalOcean too. Hell even Hostgator. *Heroku is expensive though but is nice to use

And DigitalOcean now supports deploying Docker containers, so there is no reason not to migrate to it.

> so there is no reason not to migrate to it.

Sure, "no reason" if literally the only problem you have to solve is deploying docker containers. While I'm not taking anything away from DO -- it's actually not a bad alternative for people who don't want nor need the complexity of enterprise cloud solutions -- it's still a huuuge exaggeration to say "no reason" when Docker containers is just a drop in the ocean (pun intended) of the scale of problems that AWS (attempts to) solve.

Re: AWS is not a dumb pipe

#37

Post by dilyevsky »

oneplane wrote: post #30
gkop wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Yes Aurora is highly proprietary, but S3 is a commodity in many use cases.

Commodity in usage, yes, but not on the service side. Doing S3 properly is really hard, having a service with a 'compatible API' doesn't make it the same as S3. Same goes for EKS (Yes, it looks and smells like a normal API server) and RDS. If you never use anything that ties this stuff together (like IAM), then there is practically no point in using AWS at all, it's way too expensive to use as a 'dumb pipe'. That sai…

Doing EB-scale s3 is really hard, throwing a few hundred terrabytes (or even couple petabytes) into s3 compatible storage on top of k8s is not that hard (getting easier every day). There’s numerous options available today even with enterprise support

> The most AWS-native thing (or two things) that make most other offerings not work out all that great is the integrated IAM and Security Groups

SGs are easily covered by kubernetes network policies. What do you need iam for if you’re not using any manager stuff? Sounds like circular argument to me (“you need managed bc you need iam bc you need managed…)

Re: AWS is not a dumb pipe

#38

Post by dilyevsky »

glogla wrote: post #28
didip wrote: post #17

But it can be a dumb pipe. More and more companies prefer that. Just deploy everything on EKS and use only foundational services such as S3 and PostgreSQL Aurora. There you go: Dumb Pipes. Edit: When I say dumb, it's more like: Dumb enough so that another public cloud vendor, such as GCP or Azure, can be swapped in.

Honestly, it should be. AWS is much better at the dumb, commodity services like s3, ec2 and rds (that are actually pretty smart) than they are at something like redshift, sagemaker or similar.

Define “good”? They are pretty reliable and scalable (if you exclude ebs from this mix) but have considerable cost (especially on networking side)
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