4 ms·

I wish people are upfront about conflict of interest while writing articles like this. The author is the CEO of spotinst, which is listed in the last table as 2

by jeswin 9y ago

I wish people are upfront about conflict of interest while writing articles like this. The author is the CEO of spotinst, which is listed in the last table as 2x-10x cheaper than any of the other FaaS options. The article is basically marketing copy devoid of technical details.

carterehsmith 9y ago
True. If the article is about someone promoting their business/product/solution, maybe it should be a "Show HN".
keithwhor 9y ago
This isn't a conflict of interest. It's developer marketing. A Cloud Guru, the publisher, is a company that sells developer education / training - should they have disclaimers explaining that they make money by selling education before every blog post or comic they put out? Amiram is providing important contextual advice for developers, PMs and executives, and has the added benefit of having a real product in market that will solve these problems for you. Most of HN is thinly veiled marketing supporting special interests. I think a huge part of the value of HN is lowering the barrier to entry to build great companies by providing a platform to announce and promote your product / team / etc. as well as educate people with quality content. We celebrate "Launch HN" and funding events, and are going to criticize a founder for building something awesome and talking about it? That seems a bit silly to me.
- TomBombadildoze 9y ago
  > This isn't a conflict of interest. It's developer marketing. > The article is basically marketing copy devoid of technical details. So since you agree with OP that it's marketing, _perhaps_ it's not a stretch to suggest that it's a bit shady for the CEO of Super Cheap Cloud Product to author a marketing piece decrying the hidden costs of OMG So Expensive Cloud Products as though it's just helpful advice? > I think a huge part of the value of HN is lowering the barrier to entry to build great companies by providing a platform to announce and promote your product / team / etc. as well as educate people with quality content. We celebrate "Launch HN" and funding events, and are going to criticize a founder for building something awesome and talking about it? Apples and oranges. There's a big difference between "check out this thing I made" and "these products all have somewhat opaque problems _by the way I'm CEO of a competitor_".
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - keithwhor 9y ago
    Developer marketing != valueless. Every single $B dev co you know has invested millions of dollars in developer outreach and content. It seems the issue is that there's no "technical details" as if a post titled "the hidden costs of serverless" would be about anything but costs. Perhaps the original response expected "costs" in terms of technical debt - in which case, that actually is covered as well, making the criticism a little underwhelming. If you don't agree with the article, that's one thing. Can you pick out anything in the post that's counterfactual? Look - I'm the CEO of a cloud product that, in some sense, could be considered competitive with Amiram. I've made plenty of upvoted HN comments and Medium posts talking directly about our company and what we do - hell, there's one posted here if you scroll down. I take a great deal of pride in it, and I'm very enthusiastic about the future of the space. It's for that reason I consider the criticism a little unfair. If the criticism is simply, "be more direct with your marketing and assert yourself and your company" --- that's totally fine. But dismissing an entire article because it's actively providing advice and context because the CEO runs a company in the space (wouldn't that put him in the best position to understand the market?) is... well, like I said, kind of silly. If the above is, in fact, the actual criticism - perhaps we should ask A Cloud Guru if they'd be more willing to allow promotional posts to feature partners and neat products. A big problem with content marketing (generally) is the people who control the flow of content often ask for pieces to appear as neutral as possible, where a huge chunk of motivated content producers are actually trying to push a product or service (platform, consultancy, themselves and their career, their open source, you name it).
    - nicodjimenez 9y ago
      Agreed. Ultimately we all want the best software to win. Which means we sometimes have to hear people out, regardless of whether there's self interest involved on the author's part.
      - onion2k 9y ago
teh_klev 9y ago
Well...it does say the author is CEO of Spotinst in the author profile above the article title, and also clearly states "This article represents the opinions of Amiram Shachar, CEO of Spotinst." right above the first paragraph of the article. Maybe the article has been edited since it posted here, but I don't see any reference to Spotinst product pricing. I only see IBM, Amazon, Azure and Google services in those tables. You may not have found the article useful, but as a "serverless" noob, I found it worthwhile. It certainly wasn't "devoid" of technical details.

by jeswin 9y ago

carterehsmith 9y ago

True. If the article is about someone promoting their business/product/solution, maybe it should be a "Show HN".

keithwhor 9y ago

This isn't a conflict of interest. It's developer marketing. A Cloud Guru, the publisher, is a company that sells developer education / training - should they have disclaimers explaining that they make money by selling education before every blog post or comic they put out? Amiram is providing important contextual advice for developers, PMs and executives, and has the added benefit of having a real product in market that will solve these problems for you. Most of HN is thinly veiled marketing supporting special interests. I think a huge part of the value of HN is lowering the barrier to entry to build great companies by providing a platform to announce and promote your product / team / etc. as well as educate people with quality content. We celebrate "Launch HN" and funding events, and are going to criticize a founder for building something awesome and talking about it? That seems a bit silly to me.

TomBombadildoze 9y ago
> This isn't a conflict of interest. It's developer marketing. > The article is basically marketing copy devoid of technical details. So since you agree with OP that it's marketing, _perhaps_ it's not a stretch to suggest that it's a bit shady for the CEO of Super Cheap Cloud Product to author a marketing piece decrying the hidden costs of OMG So Expensive Cloud Products as though it's just helpful advice? > I think a huge part of the value of HN is lowering the barrier to entry to build great companies by providing a platform to announce and promote your product / team / etc. as well as educate people with quality content. We celebrate "Launch HN" and funding events, and are going to criticize a founder for building something awesome and talking about it? Apples and oranges. There's a big difference between "check out this thing I made" and "these products all have somewhat opaque problems _by the way I'm CEO of a competitor_".
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- keithwhor 9y ago
  Developer marketing != valueless. Every single $B dev co you know has invested millions of dollars in developer outreach and content. It seems the issue is that there's no "technical details" as if a post titled "the hidden costs of serverless" would be about anything but costs. Perhaps the original response expected "costs" in terms of technical debt - in which case, that actually is covered as well, making the criticism a little underwhelming. If you don't agree with the article, that's one thing. Can you pick out anything in the post that's counterfactual? Look - I'm the CEO of a cloud product that, in some sense, could be considered competitive with Amiram. I've made plenty of upvoted HN comments and Medium posts talking directly about our company and what we do - hell, there's one posted here if you scroll down. I take a great deal of pride in it, and I'm very enthusiastic about the future of the space. It's for that reason I consider the criticism a little unfair. If the criticism is simply, "be more direct with your marketing and assert yourself and your company" --- that's totally fine. But dismissing an entire article because it's actively providing advice and context because the CEO runs a company in the space (wouldn't that put him in the best position to understand the market?) is... well, like I said, kind of silly. If the above is, in fact, the actual criticism - perhaps we should ask A Cloud Guru if they'd be more willing to allow promotional posts to feature partners and neat products. A big problem with content marketing (generally) is the people who control the flow of content often ask for pieces to appear as neutral as possible, where a huge chunk of motivated content producers are actually trying to push a product or service (platform, consultancy, themselves and their career, their open source, you name it).
  - nicodjimenez 9y ago
    Agreed. Ultimately we all want the best software to win. Which means we sometimes have to hear people out, regardless of whether there's self interest involved on the author's part.
    - onion2k 9y ago

teh_klev 9y ago

Well...it does say the author is CEO of Spotinst in the author profile above the article title, and also clearly states "This article represents the opinions of Amiram Shachar, CEO of Spotinst." right above the first paragraph of the article. Maybe the article has been edited since it posted here, but I don't see any reference to Spotinst product pricing. I only see IBM, Amazon, Azure and Google services in those tables. You may not have found the article useful, but as a "serverless" noob, I found it worthwhile. It certainly wasn't "devoid" of technical details.