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Amazing, but not surprising, that AWS is overtaking the retail operation in terms of profit and growth. For all the minor frustrations involved in running a big

Amazing, but not surprising, that AWS is overtaking the retail operation in terms of profit and growth. For all the minor frustrations involved in running a big operation on AWS (good luck actually provisioning 1000 instances of a single type on a whim during peak hours), the service itself is nothing short of miraculous to someone who ran physical server farms a mere decade ago. All that said, of course, Amazon's dominance will become a problem if no other competitors find a way to seriously compete. Certainly their newer services are designed to foster lock-in as much as they are made to provide simpler architectures and automated resource management. But I sincerely hope one of the smaller players grows into a real contender as well. Amazon, at least at first, seemed like a disinterested player making a hedge bet. Their customers were not competitors. With Google and Microsoft the same can't be said.

optionalparens 11y ago
Any players are good that encourage Amazon to do a better job. I really think AWS improved since Azure and GCE came along. Moreover, when I dealt with Amazon on calls and in meetings, any time we mentioned the Google or Azure words, they immediately wanted to proactively respond (and eventually did). We were a customer of both their competitors so this helped, but I give Amazon some credit. Regarding lock-in, I think you are right but everyone seems to be doing this. I think for better or worse, part of what Amazon has done has been adapting what they already were doing in-house into a product. Sometimes when people just come up with products to compete or "just because," they add in a lot of nonsense and architect things badly. Microsoft seemed to be going both routes at different times with Azure. I was an original user of Azure including the various data stores/data stores they asked for at the time. To say everything on Azure, whether the machines, data stores, services, libraries, or anything else were horrible would be an understatement (might be one of the worst major platforms I've used ever). Amazing how they turned it around when they were sure they had to compete stronger.
- larkscall 11y ago
  It's irony manifest that companies would consider moving away from vendor lockin in data centers they own to data centers they do not own yet still locked into one vendor's platform.
kordless 11y ago
Competition with Amazon AWS won't come from where you expect. Amazon owns the public cloud, so whatever it is won't technically be a public cloud offering.

optionalparens 11y ago

Any players are good that encourage Amazon to do a better job. I really think AWS improved since Azure and GCE came along. Moreover, when I dealt with Amazon on calls and in meetings, any time we mentioned the Google or Azure words, they immediately wanted to proactively respond (and eventually did). We were a customer of both their competitors so this helped, but I give Amazon some credit. Regarding lock-in, I think you are right but everyone seems to be doing this. I think for better or worse, part of what Amazon has done has been adapting what they already were doing in-house into a product. Sometimes when people just come up with products to compete or "just because," they add in a lot of nonsense and architect things badly. Microsoft seemed to be going both routes at different times with Azure. I was an original user of Azure including the various data stores/data stores they asked for at the time. To say everything on Azure, whether the machines, data stores, services, libraries, or anything else were horrible would be an understatement (might be one of the worst major platforms I've used ever). Amazing how they turned it around when they were sure they had to compete stronger.

larkscall 11y ago
It's irony manifest that companies would consider moving away from vendor lockin in data centers they own to data centers they do not own yet still locked into one vendor's platform.

kordless 11y ago

Competition with Amazon AWS won't come from where you expect. Amazon owns the public cloud, so whatever it is won't technically be a public cloud offering.