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The question for me is, does Amazon buy Snowflake or beat Snowflake? Snowflake is built on AWS, you can be sure Amazon has been watching them for years. I’ll

The question for me is, does Amazon buy Snowflake or beat Snowflake? Snowflake is built on AWS, you can be sure Amazon has been watching them for years. I’ll put my money that by 2020 AWS will have a strong Snowflake competitor. Honestly, Athena/Redshift Spectrum are getting somewhat close.

adventured 9y ago
I'm astounded these days when I pull up an overview list of all of the AWS products. They currently list 142 products (several should be excluded). It seems like that has tripled in maybe four years. One of the nice things about AWS trying to do everything, it's guaranteed they're going to do a lot of things at a mediocre level. As they aggressively expand that product list, the number of things they suck at will increase.
- onion2k 9y ago
  it's guaranteed they're going to do a lot of things at a mediocre level Why? If it was a smaller company then spreading resources out across more and more products could result in a drop in quality, but this is Amazon. They have practically unlimited resources. They can afford to put far more in to products than other companies, and they've already got a team who can build some really good stuff. If they can capture what works and use it to understand how to build their products that should result in better products rather than worse.
  - adwf 9y ago
    By that logic, all big companies must be the best because they have huge resources. Scale means you can throw lots of people at something, it doesn't mean you can make it good. Bureaucracy, internal politics, budget/cost cutting, unpleasant work environment, short-term stock price targets instead of long-term goal based targets... There are a million and one reasons why big companies start to suck.
- jrowley 9y ago
  I don't see why that's necessarily the case. One could argue as they grow their software development methodologies also advance as an organization and they'll create better products. Also as more competition can spur either copying or innovation.
- adwf 9y ago
  I agree, so many of the AWS products feel almost abandoned. Like they did the easy 80% of the work, released, and then coasted.
Eridrus 9y ago
Snowflake isn't just reselling storage and compute though, they're building some pretty impressive software. One of the standout features when I used them a few years ago was their ability to do analytic queries on JSON columns in huge databases. Maybe Postgres is up to the task on it's own now, but MongoDB at the time was not.
- tampajohn 9y ago
  Yeah, we moved from Mongo -> Postgres -> Snowflake (skipped redis due to connection limits). Really great performance and support from various ETL & Reporting tools. Glad to see them succeed.

adventured 9y ago

I'm astounded these days when I pull up an overview list of all of the AWS products. They currently list 142 products (several should be excluded). It seems like that has tripled in maybe four years. One of the nice things about AWS trying to do everything, it's guaranteed they're going to do a lot of things at a mediocre level. As they aggressively expand that product list, the number of things they suck at will increase.

onion2k 9y ago
it's guaranteed they're going to do a lot of things at a mediocre level Why? If it was a smaller company then spreading resources out across more and more products could result in a drop in quality, but this is Amazon. They have practically unlimited resources. They can afford to put far more in to products than other companies, and they've already got a team who can build some really good stuff. If they can capture what works and use it to understand how to build their products that should result in better products rather than worse.
- adwf 9y ago
  By that logic, all big companies must be the best because they have huge resources. Scale means you can throw lots of people at something, it doesn't mean you can make it good. Bureaucracy, internal politics, budget/cost cutting, unpleasant work environment, short-term stock price targets instead of long-term goal based targets... There are a million and one reasons why big companies start to suck.
jrowley 9y ago
I don't see why that's necessarily the case. One could argue as they grow their software development methodologies also advance as an organization and they'll create better products. Also as more competition can spur either copying or innovation.
adwf 9y ago
I agree, so many of the AWS products feel almost abandoned. Like they did the easy 80% of the work, released, and then coasted.

Eridrus 9y ago

Snowflake isn't just reselling storage and compute though, they're building some pretty impressive software. One of the standout features when I used them a few years ago was their ability to do analytic queries on JSON columns in huge databases. Maybe Postgres is up to the task on it's own now, but MongoDB at the time was not.

tampajohn 9y ago
Yeah, we moved from Mongo -> Postgres -> Snowflake (skipped redis due to connection limits). Really great performance and support from various ETL & Reporting tools. Glad to see them succeed.