[HN Gopher] AWS is not a dumb pipe
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AWS is not a dumb pipe
 
Author : antigizmo
Score  : 39 points
Date   : 2022-01-21 21:34 UTC (1 hours ago)
 
web link (matt-rickard.com)
w3m dump (matt-rickard.com)
 
| _009 wrote:
| AWS is the next Oracle
 
  | echelon wrote:
  | Big, expensive, boondoggly, stranglehold on legacy workloads,
  | friends with your C-suite, and engineers and ICs hate it?
  | 
  | What is the opposite?
 
| vm2196 wrote:
| "won many others. Kinesis vs. Kafka, DocumentDB vs. MongoDB,
| MemoryDB vs. Redis, OpenSearch vs. ElasticSearch."
| 
| Lol. Wrong on all of those.
 
  | FridgeSeal wrote:
  | I was just about to add a comment about this too.
  | 
  | Also saying they "missed the Snowflake opportunity" doesn't
  | make sense either: they have Redshift? They don't need to
  | acquire Snowflake, they're already the incumbent in the field.
 
    | rckrd wrote:
    | 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.
 
  | tstrimple wrote:
  | Yeah, I'm not sure the point they are trying to make here. Each
  | of these AWS services is clearly and demonstrably less popular
  | than the alternative it's compared against. Mongo and
  | DocumentDB for example aren't even close: https://db-
  | engines.com/en/ranking_trend/system/Amazon+Docume...
 
    | ljm wrote:
    | OpenSearch is a massively inferior offering compared to
    | Elasticsearch too. It became outdated the moment it was
    | forked, the documentation is lacking, and since you'll end up
    | looking up ES docs and forgetting to switch to version 7.10,
    | you'll get a nice reminder of everything new that has been
    | added that you can't actually use.
 
    | lmeyerov wrote:
    | For big cloud markets, being #2 or #3 is a win:
    | 
    | - #2, #3, even maybe #4/#5 are big revenue. Cloud is
    | unusually big and still growing insanely.
    | 
    | - crazy margins when they don't have to invent the core
    | concept, go through core product/market fit R&D, nor fight
    | for a distribution channel to market+sell it, nor fight
    | middlemen for competitive pricing
    | 
    | - cross-selling & ecosystem lock-in means even revenue/profit
    | don't have to be high or even positive
 
    | ljm wrote:
    | OpenSearch is a massively inferior offering compared to
    | Elasticsearch too. It became outdated the moment it was
    | forked, the documentation is lacking, and since you'll end up
    | looking up ES docs and forgetting to switch to version 7.10,
    | you'll get a nice reminder of everything new that has been
    | added that you can't actually use.
    | 
    | The only thing it has going for it is that it's managed and
    | you're already on AWS, so you don't need to spend months
    | working up a contract with a new vendor and doing the
    | security audit dance.
 
      | noogle wrote:
      | > so you don't need to spend months working up a contract
      | with a new vendor and doing the security audit dance.
      | 
      | That's a very big moat. Many decision makers are risk-
      | averse w.r.t to infrastructure vendors and don't mind
      | paying (or making someone else pay) a premium for that.
      | 
      | The only thing that changed in the saying "no one was fire
      | for choosing IBM" is the name.
 
| karmakaze wrote:
| False dichotomy -- AWS is not _only_ a dumb pipe
| 
| The value I see in AWS isn't that anything is done particularly
| well. It's that there's enough of it that I can get most all of
| what I need in one place.
 
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(page generated 2022-01-21 23:00 UTC)