13 ms·

Unbundling AWS

331 points by taylorwc 7y ago

arikrak 7y ago
Craigslist didn't try to improve their product which left me opportunity for other startups than there would have been otherwise.
cocktailpeanuts 7y ago
I am all for unbundling AWS, but I think it's different from Craigslist. Craigslist is a consumer facing app, which is much easier to "unbundle" than something like AWS which faces enterprises. Even if some "unbundle wannabe" starts getting traction, I think Amazon will simply catch up by lowering the price as much as possible and putting more resources into improving the developer experience for the corresponding service. But if anyone has some great insight, please share. I would love to see this "great unbundling of the AWS" happen.
- taylorwc 7y ago
  Author here. You are completely right. There are a million ways the analogy breaks down: consumer vs enterprise, marketplace vs IaaS... It was more just that looking at the console jogged my memory in a visual way and I do believe there are axes on which AWS doesn't compete well in the long run, i.e., offerings where price is not the primary consideration.
  - tech_man7 7y ago
    good article. Have you seen what Golem (https://golem.network/ https://golem.network/) has done in terms of crowdsourcing compute power and creating a marketplace?
- zxcmx 7y ago
  A frequently overlooked aspect in enterprise is billing, accounting and supplier agreement overhead. In enterprise, Joe developer can often add / use more AWS services and it just goes on the giant enterprise bill, no questions asked. If you want to use a third party service, waay more work. Supplier assessment needs to be done (by the department that does that) looking at security, company stability, data sovereignty etc. Procurement get involved to negotiate supplier agreement with the vendor and your project needs a specific budget line item which might require a trip to accounting. To get signoff and justify your vendor selection you might also have to do a stupid internal evaluation thing / bakeoff (even though of course you know the thing you really want) where you build feature matrix and carefully adjust the rows so your preferred vendor gets the most ticks. All this paperwork can take weeks or months. While a lot of the AWS service offerings are sub-par compared to alternatives, the technical work of papering over this is usually less risky than dealing with all the internal departments which will delay your project if you try to use another vendor. I think this is a big driver towards bundling being a win for them.
  - user5994461 7y ago
    >>> While a lot of the AWS service offerings are sub-par compared to alternatives If you try to get some services in an entreprise, maybe a physical server or get a database, you may easily find that it takes months of paperwork and waiting. Then it's poorly operated and broken half of the time (why are they provisioning a hundred databases on a single shared host? or using a shared NAS as storage?) AWS services may not be perfect but it's miles ahead from the shitty services you get in an enterprise.
  - caseymarquis 7y ago
    Heck, I work at a 20 person company and this is still generally true. No one is stopping me from using a new service, but using AWS means no new paperwork and no questions. Actionable advice on this would be: If you're B2B, have an option for yearly billing via invoice. Billing yearly via invoice vs a monthly direct debit means our finance people deal with payment, and just ask Engineering once a year if they should pay this weird bill they got. Billing via direct debit means I have to do paperwork every month. I don't enjoy things like paperwork. I do enjoy things like building a single customer MVP version of your service on AWS in a couple hours. You can guess which I'm going to choose if you don't offer yearly billing.
    - fierarul 7y ago
      Seems a bit risky to wait a whole year to collect what's due. I don't believe I ever heard of yearly invoicing like this. Of course, if your small company would like to pre-pay towards an approximation of your early invoice I'm pretty sure some company would be accommodating.
      - caseymarquis 7y ago
        I figured paying for a year up front was implied.
        iakh 7y ago
        Not sure how that could work since most services are based on consumption
- tempsolution 7y ago
  AFAIK, I can't remember an instance where AWS raised prices. So if they were to undercut someone in prices, they would not be able to raise them again, so I find this scenario unlikely to happen.
- halbritt 7y ago
  Historically, AWS hasn't done this. They haven't lowered prices on RDS, Elasticsearch, etc. There are far superior options available. The lock-in on billing explains the adoption of these services, but there a tremendous number of accounts of folks struggling to make any of the secondary services scale worth a damn.
MuffinFlavored 7y ago
A 1GB hosted Redis instance is $40/mo on Azure (which I’m told is competitive with AWS/GCP) yet a “bare-metal” instance with 1GB of memory (in which you can configure to run Redis yourself) is $5/mo. Are all hosted infrastructure prices this inflated?
- parhamn 7y ago
  Backups, configuration and failover. Which traditionally meant a db guy or an ops guy which costs money. I've done it for multiple database technologies and doing it right is not at all easy or cheap on time. With that said, Kubernetes might fix this because they have access to more parts of the system in a generic API. With tech like KubeDB[1] and other operators[2] we might see these prices coming closer to bare-metal. [1] https://kubedb.com/ https://kubedb.com/ [2] https://github.com/zalando/postgres-operator https://github.com/zalando/postgres-operator
  - MuffinFlavored 7y ago
    Does running Postgres in a container hurt performance?
    - Nullabillity 7y ago
      Not inherently, but if you want to use provisioned storage then your storage driver[0] will have some cost (unless you use local storage). Of course, if you're on AWS then you'd be paying the EBS tax either way. [0]: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/storage/storage-classes/#provisioner https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/storage/storage-classes/...
    - ec109685 7y ago
      No.
      - ci5er 7y ago
        It used to be unreliable. Is it not now?
jorblumesea 7y ago
> some of their offerings shift from being best-in-class to being very reliable and with a ‘just-ok-but-well-integrated’ user experience. I would go further and say that some of their experiences are buggy and often non-functional. Ever tried to search for a service in ECS? The results load from the backend, and it's a frontend based search on the backend set. Meaning it will say your service does not exist, but you're only searching on that page * offset. Then there's the Elastisearch fiasco... https://spun.io/2019/10/10/aws-elasticsearch-a-fundamentally-flawed-offering/ https://spun.io/2019/10/10/aws-elasticsearch-a-fundamentally... There are many examples where basic AWS functionality is broken.
parhamn 7y ago
One major thing this doesn't consider is the technical limitations which are latency & bandwidth. (1) You save a ton of money on bandwidth when you move data from AWS to AWS (2) Your stack, in most cases, needs to be near each other to minimize latency. Databases get wrecked by this. This is why, cloud database providers have to often transparently show you which cloud you're launching on [1] which effectively means AWS is going to get a good share of it anyway. My uninformed guess is that EC2&S3 are by far their biggest money maker which is going to be what unbundlers target. I'm all for the unbundling and will probably take part in some of it, but I don't think it will be that easy. [1] https://www.cockroachlabs.com/product/cockroachcloud https://www.cockroachlabs.com/product/cockroachcloud
- jnwatson 7y ago
  Bandwidth/latency was my first thought too. Still, for higher-level services, it is entirely possible to compete with AWS running on lower-level AWS infrastructure, rendering the network issues moot.
- whoevercares 7y ago
  Well any other AWS service almost exclusively built on top of EC2/S3, so it’s safe to say it drives all of AWS revenue either directly or indirectly. Probably some service’s use EC2 instance hours as its revenue measure
  - zwkrt 7y ago
    I think the real moneymaker is that AWS keeps making their servers more efficient but doesn’t lower their costs
    - stornetn 7y ago
      Isn’t AWS fairly widely reputed for having lowered its prices dozens of times since first launching? https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/new-research-from-tso-logic-shows-aws-costs-get-lower-every-year/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/new-research-from-tso-logic...
- 7y ago
buboard 7y ago
LAMP was a simple stack. It was performant, and not bloated. That's why 1000 different datacenters could provide the same service. Are there such sub-bundles in AWS that are cheap enough to run without amazon's scale ? Do people even need that huge scaling capability or is AWS just convenient?
- Demiurge 7y ago
  I honestly don’t get this myself. I understand AWS for a fast moving startup, but I’m seeing friends start hobby projects that will never need more than one $5/m shared dedicated host, and pay $60/m for worse performance.
  - kelp 7y ago
    Personally I use DigitalOcean for this sort of thing. But this is why AWS has Lightsail https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/ https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/ to service that use case and then let people upgrade later to full AWS.
  - mattbillenstein 7y ago
    They're doing that to learn AWS!
cj 7y ago
Hm, I don’t think the craigslist analogy works. For the same reason it’s difficult to argue there’s opportunity for “unbundling Facebook” by launching a new image sharing service, building a news aggregator to compete with newsfeed, building a new messaging app to compete with Messenger, etc. The main reason I disagree with the premise is security / compliance requirements of large customers (a large percentage of the market). The largest purchasers of AWS-like services prefer to work with as few vendors as necessary to minimize the number of vendors they need to worry about during security audits, contracting, etc. The other obvious problem is, similar to Facebook, AWS has a “network effect”, in that all AWS services live in the same physical data centers, which results in potentially competing services suffering from higher latency than “native AWS” services which might make it harder to compete. Consumers did not have the same level of loyalty to Craigslist as business have to AWS.
vegardx 7y ago
There's definitively a market for unbundling services from Amazon, but the problem is that people forget what the actual killer feature of AWS is; IAM and Instance Metadata Service.
- aflag 7y ago
  Can you elaborate? After your comment I started thinking I must not really get IAM.
  - Terretta 7y ago
    IAM = dynamic role based access to and among all your things, through policy-as-code. If you just Allow: *, you might not care. If you practice least privilege, this is hard to do another way.
awinder 7y ago
Kind-of alluded to in the article, but if you’re going to unbundle AWS, you’re going to have to figure out how to get the bandwidth 0-rated. One of amazons biggest moats (imo) is that they can realize monumental cost savings on bandwidth while making it very pricy to other service providers. So if you need to architect bandwidth-hungry or “high scale” applications, going outside of AWS becomes way too expensive. Even privatelink tacks on bandwidth charges. You’d have to look at DB providers like Elastic to see how to do this, I think. But it’s going to involve a very complex and high touch deployment & support environment. This effectively “prices out” certain classes of applications as too expensive for value returned. Again I could be looking at this very wrong, and figuring out how to build profitable unbundled AWS services would be a great business, but it’s hard to see how to successfully execute.
- EGreg 7y ago
  I think the Cloud is a result of a gradual move towards centralization of networked software built by software developers living in countries where DSL and cable broadband was rolled it early. It was a bit like mainframe developers back in the day. I remember people discussing “fat clients” vs “thin clients”. We forgot what it’s like to have dialup, and the innovative generation of decentralized software protocols (IRC, Usenet etc) faded into obscurity. Even Email and the Web are now centralized! Well the companies won and now we have a feudal kingdom again where we are the data-serfs. We have been well-trained like pavlov’s dogs using notifications and rewards (likes, comments) to till the datafields and plant fresh crops, use our social capital to reshare articles etc. And you know that you’re a serf when that notification lights up on your master’s device and you pause talking to your girlfriend, wife or child to look at it and maybe act on it. And of course governments love having a central place they can implement censorship and spy on everyone. This has got to stop. It’s not just a technological topology problem, it’s become a sociological problem and even a problem of democracy and society. THE SOLUTION IS OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE that will disrupt the landlords of the Web (Facebook, Google, Amazon etc.) as much as the Web once disrupted the landlords of the Internet (AOL, MSN, Compuserve). The first HTTP browsers weren’t better than AOL at anything except one thing... ANYONE could permissionlessly host a web browser. What realistic alternatives do we have to Facebook today? Google Docs? That anyone can easily host and share stuff with friends to easily collaborate? It would have to have people’s identity and contacts stay consistent across domains, without owning them and storing them on centralized servers like Facebook. I know a few attempts. Diaspora, Solid, Mastodon and Matrix. I also liked Sandstorm a lot, and OwnCloud was ok. They have not reached mass adoption. Scuttlebutt is slightly better in that it can interoperate with everything. The biggest winner in the last few years has been the DID standard, although it solves one problem only. There is also an innovative project called MaidSAFE which raised around $10M and spent 12 years so far building this back-end. I have high hopes for it once it is released and plan to make Qbix Platform interoperate with it. Check it out: https://maidsafe.net/ https://maidsafe.net/ We will eventually replace the idea of a startup running a database that has to scale, with an open source startup that releases software that anyone can pay any hosting company to run and makes money via tokens. That was the dream of cryptocurrency. The first kind of startup extracts rents via a SAAS model and forcibly bundles infrastructure management (Slack, Salesforce, Twitter, Etsy, you name it). The other doesn’t care about cheaper “cloud” costs so much, because anyone can host it (Wordpress, Magento, Drupal etc.) and the hosting costs are miniscule for each individual client business. Wordpress and Magento and Drupal are all valued in the billions, as open source companies. Maybe people on HN should strive for this rather than “Zero to One” “competition is for losers” “build a monopoly and extract rents” Peter Thiel style facebook startups. Do we need something like this? Or am I just ranting? EDIT: why whenever I post this subject, it is heavily downvoted with no actual replies or explanations showing me why my position is wrong? Is there a coordinated effort to downvote this position without further engaging with it?
yellow_lead 7y ago
> There are obvious differences between Craigslist and AWS. The most important is that Craigslist (and each of the category spawn) is a marketplace, and so has the powerful advantage of network effects. Isn't AWS also a marketplace?
- elcomet 7y ago
  No. It's only amazon selling services, not everyone. Amazon is a service provider.
  - cthalupa 7y ago
    This is... Kind of true, kind of false. The AMI marketplace is probably the biggest and most long running example of a marketplace where others are selling services (software licenses/support), but privatelink allows people to make a SaaS and not only sell it on a marketplace on AWS, but also do so with an endpoint in your VPC so you don't have to go out over the public internet. I have no idea how well utilized that sort of thing is, so in reality it might be similar to there not being an option in the first place, and I'm sure in general Amazon sells far far far more services themselves, but it is possible for people besides Amazon to sell services on AWS.
EGreg 7y ago
Most profits are obtained by bundling closed-source or costly infrastructure together with stuff that is cheap but inseparable from it, so you can extract rents. That’s why open source unleashes an explosion in innovation.
jakozaur 7y ago
1. AWS got business advantage of buying 100+ services at once, without going through procurement, invoicing, GDPR Data Processing Agreements, on/off boarding, same support, good security and uptime, credibility of keeping backward compatibility for decades etc. There should be open platform that would eliminate that advantage. 2. EC2 and S3 when used properly would be harder to beat. You can get reserved discounts, spot, elasticity... Moving them would require paying for bandwidth which easily makes playing field uneven. 3. The higher layer of services CloudWatch, ElasticSearch, Cognito got much higher margins, yet lacking functionality and quality. Much easier targets for disruption.
angry_octet 7y ago
Once you have significant data on AWS it costs you so much to transfer it you are stuck with them. Their data fees are insane, and so are their storage fees. Also, AWS is slow. If I have a filer with 500TB of disk I should be getting 5-10GiBy/s reads, and burst writes should be that fast too. With EFS I get 200MiBy/s MAX. Likewise EBS and emphemeral SSDs top out at 250MiBy/s, which is just abysmal. AWS security is so complicated now, at the control plane layer, that hardly anyone understands it. So if there was a competitor that gave real hardware performance and a simpler security validation at a reasonable price, they could win business. But I don't see Oracle/Azure/GCP etc doing that.
- adreamingsoul 7y ago
  What would you be willing to pay for “physical like” performance?
  - msjyoo 7y ago
    Physical-like prices?
    - nine_k 7y ago
      Yes, which are mostly SRE salaries.
    - qes 7y ago
      What happens when the SSD in your colo server malfunctions? What happens when the (an) SSD attached to your cloud VM malfunctions? Why do you think those two setups should cost the same?
      - vidarh 7y ago
        Because it happens at a low enough frequency that dealing with it at places I've managed physical racks is pretty much a rounding error relative to the hardware costs. And AWS has other complexities, so the devops costs with AWS are different, but rarely lower than managing physical hardware. I'd never pick AWS based on total cost - it's an expensive convenience that first starts to pay off in terms of cost once you're big enough to negotiate huge discounts. If you can afford it, it's great, but a lot of people who use AWS have no idea how much of a premium they pay for it.
jeswin 7y ago
> As an early stage investor, I’m hard-pressed to name any tectonic shifts that have had as much impact on startup formation. Gross exaggeration. Most startups should worry less about 100% uptime and scaling than about sales. A dedicated server or two goes a long way, and it isn't/wasn't really that much harder.
- scarface74 7y ago
  It’s really crazy the myopia I see with posts like this. I’ve worked in the B2B space mostly in healthcare.. When you get a sale to business where they are outsourcing a major piece of their functionality to you. You can’t shrug and not worry about uptime. If you’re building Twitter it doesn’t matter.
  - jeswin 7y ago
    > It’s really crazy the myopia I see with posts like this. I said "most startups", not critical medical care. I've dealt with startups for nearly two decades and most startups can begin operations without the cloud, and with the possibility of downtime. Even in healthcare there are plenty of systems where varying levels of downtime is acceptable.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      In any small B2B company where your business is based on a few big spenders, uptime is important. If you lose one customer you lose a noticeable share of revenue.
      - adrianmsmith 7y ago
        The assumption there is that if you're down, you'll lose the customer. But that depends on the industry. At least in one industry I've worked in (B2B accountancy and reporting software), the product can be down for a day and it doesn't matter. A few employees at the customer are using our software to produce monthly reports, and if they have to wait until the next day to produce the reports, they're annoyed but they can get on with other work in the meantime. I mean, for sure, it's not ideal, and you'll get emails to complain, but so far nobody has cancelled on us due to something like that. I'm not saying I like the product being down, but I can understand the CEO not wanting to pay extra to invest in redundant infrastructure, it's probably the correct business decision.
streetcat1 7y ago
The analogy in the article is wrong. Aws is not a marketplace and does not enjoy network effects. I.e. if developer A uses AWS, this does not affect developer B. What AWS enjoy is economy of scale (huge capex) which should help reduce price (but I am not sure that this is happening), and being first to market (Nobody got fired for choosing IBM). Basically the main value prop today, as I see it, is saving the operation costs (human cost), by offloading them to amazon. This will be solved by Kubernetes operators. Moreover, most of the new computational intensive workload (E.g. IOT / AI ) is better done on the edge.
- cocktailpeanuts 7y ago
  There are more than one type of network effects. This one is called "Indirect network effect". What you have written is direct network effect. As more developers start using AWS, there forms a large developer ecosystem around AWS tools and services, and therefore "developer B" will find it much easier and cheaper to use AWS, indirectly.
  - streetcat1 7y ago
    So they will not find it much cheaper. AWS is priced that same regardless. They might enjoy knowledge sharing, but at the speed that AWS evolves, the half-life of such knowledge is very short. If I would bet on anything it would be Kubernetes. At least my knowledge is the same across clouds/on-prem. And there is no gatekeeper.
    - nickbauman 7y ago
      Except the technical complexity. I work with some very experienced k8s devops engineers these days and they screw up catastrophically every so often because of the million switches and buttons on k8s.
      - streetcat1 7y ago
        Right. Kubernetes is supposed to be managed by machines not by humans.
awinter-py 7y ago
author's focus on datadog & metrics tools as the place to innovate is a smart way in in particular, declarative dashboards (from code) and declarative alerts (from code) would make my life a lot easier feedback-based / ML alerting thresholds might also hit the spot -- this is an area where black box isn't safe enough and some innovation is needed getting any piece of information from datadog or amzn / goog's in-house dashboards is like pulling teeth -- they're so slow and clunky
dustingetz 7y ago
In the tech circles I hang out we think of AWS as the next operating system. In 10-15 years it will be mostly invisible to the application programmer due to abstractions built on top of it. This is a new frontier for startups.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  That is very true. It is an operating system now.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- peterwwillis 7y ago
  But it's way more than an operating system, it's managed. K8s is a kit car, AWS is a Toyota with a warranty. I agree that the future is distributed operating systems. I think we desperately need to load in the core features of a D-OS into Linux for it to stay relevant, or a competitive startup will create a tailored environment for programmers that will not even be recognizable as Linux, yet it will be used everywhere because of its ubiquity. (Docker, anyone?) For example, Terraform is kind of garbage usability-wise, but it just works with every cloud provider feature you can think of; it's a no-brainer. If a D-OS also naturally bundled hooks for every single feature of every managed cloud provider, along with a simplified way to hook custom applications and bundle the whole thing, literally everyone would use it for all their apps and run it everywhere.
- qaq 7y ago
  alternatively in 15 years there will be less than 0.01% workloads that a mainstream 2-way Epyc XXXX Server with 512 physical cores 64TB RAM and 10,000,000 IOPS will not handle so 90% of cloud services will become meaningless :).
  - Terretta 7y ago
    > 90% of cloud services will become meaningless As will that Epyc XXXX server, absent a well-peered and hardened services mesh for it to plug into. Cloud shouldn’t be used for just someone else’s computer. It’s not the compute or the storage, it’s the network.
jpalomaki 7y ago
It is usually easier to dump costs to the already hefty AWS bill than push a completely new service provider through procurement process.
bassamtabbara 7y ago
I made a similar argument [1][2] about tipping the cloud computing market from vertical to horizontal integration. One important aspect of this transformation is to maintain the feel of an integrated cloud provider, and not let the customer/end-user deal with the cost of heterogeneity [3]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOssXrkNYxM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOssXrkNYxM [2] https://speakerdeck.com/bassam/opening-up-the-cloud-with-crossplane https://speakerdeck.com/bassam/opening-up-the-cloud-with-cro... [3] https://crossplane.io https://crossplane.io
chx 7y ago
https://twitter.com/br_/status/979442438254166016 https://twitter.com/br_/status/979442438254166016 > "selling AWS at a loss" is crisp shorthand for a lot of startups' business models!
ksec 7y ago
How does the Unbundling work if the Services you are Unbundling runs on AWS? I dont understand how Craglist and AWS relates? Craglist.... is a .. list or a market place. AWS is literally like a Fortune 2000 business that is in itself fully vertically integrated from Hardware to Software and Network. And then you have economy of scale, and Good enough is enemy of Best. The barrier of Entry to recreate Craglist is less than a rounding error in recreating AWS or even any part of its sub component. I dont have any numbers to back me up on this, so take this with the biggest grain of salt. I do think there is a Market for provider that sits underneath AWS or GCP, something like DigitalOcean. AWS or GCP are like Enterprise product with millions of features being offered to all, while DO is like a simple to use product that is scaling up its feature offering. And it offers the essential of Cloud Hosting with Better experience. ( Comparatively Speaking ) Or Heroku with their own Infrastructure, ( or Cheaper Pricing )
noway421 7y ago
another point: you don't pay for services you don't use, so AWS is not "bundled" to begin with. you get to pick and choose. in such a model, i don't see any benefit in fragmentation tbh.
hartror 7y ago
I've not come across the term JAMstack before, why doesn't this make sense for using with AWS as the author suggests?
- unraveller 7y ago
  AWS is best for big projects with lots of data processing in different ways that need scale, that's what all the features are for. JAMstack usually implies a simple text API which you could use on AWS AppSync for example but there are much simpler horizontal alternatives since a tiny websocket server can handle many 100,000s of users.
dana321 7y ago
AWS is expensive for what it is. I really don't understand the hype machine around what they provide, since openstack has been around for a few years.
spicyramen 7y ago
One missing point is the support for customers and partners. AWS and Azure provide amazing support experience which emulates and improve what Cisco, HP, IBM did in the Enterprise space many years before: TAC, Forums, certifications, partner ecosystem. When you have an issue someone will actually respond to it. I was interested in Google Cloud but their support was non-existent, seems to be that their leadership came from the consumer world where a person is just dumb and their product is always perfect. Specifically I had an issue with Firebase which I found the answer on Stackoverflow eventually (app was down for few hours because Google blacklist my environment by mistake). Since my company relies on high availability, we needed to work from day 0 with AWS on the design and have a person which would be available to respond to queries directly. Looks like with new Google CEO that's changing but just cares about large enterprises . With that in mind AWS and Azure to me will become a binary option.
0xkalle 7y ago
Small note: I wouldn't count the serverless framework as cloud agnostic. Yes you can use the framework for all major clouds but you have to adjust your project for that. Serverless does not abstract the events, function context or other service APIs which would be needed if it would be really cloud agnostic = you can deploy your project to different providers without changes.
overgard 7y ago
A lot of the value of AWS is its integration within itself. (even if it can be full of rough edges). I think the danger with unbundling is that your competing project needs to be clearly so much better that people are going to be willing to go through the hassle of configuring a lot of complicated networking to work with what they already have, along with separate billing etc. Not saying it can't be done, but it means the barrier to entry is really really high. You're not just convincing them your service is better, you're also convincing them that it's so much better that they should be willing to take on extra headaches for it. If I were to compete with aws, I think the area I'd really go after them with is better kubernetes support. I've yet to see any cloud provider really do it well, to be honest (which isn't surprising, development on kubernetes moves so fast and it's so advanced, it's kind of amazing, but that does mean it's really hard to make it nice outside of a "works for a demo" kind of deal). Azure and GCP do kubernetes a little bit better, but I think if someone were to come in and say, like, I don't know, we can do kubernetes on bare metal so it's much faster than through a VM, and all our services are natively integrated, that would be a cool story. The other area I might compete with AWS is in finding niches where organizations might be hesitant to build an operations department, but they really need cloud computing. So, for instance, maybe scientific computing or something like that. If you could make a really useful cloud that can be administered by someone who barely knows linux, that could be a thing.

331 points by taylorwc 7y ago

Craigslist didn't try to improve their product which left me opportunity for other startups than there would have been otherwise.

cocktailpeanuts 7y ago

I am all for unbundling AWS, but I think it's different from Craigslist. Craigslist is a consumer facing app, which is much easier to "unbundle" than something like AWS which faces enterprises. Even if some "unbundle wannabe" starts getting traction, I think Amazon will simply catch up by lowering the price as much as possible and putting more resources into improving the developer experience for the corresponding service. But if anyone has some great insight, please share. I would love to see this "great unbundling of the AWS" happen.

taylorwc 7y ago
Author here. You are completely right. There are a million ways the analogy breaks down: consumer vs enterprise, marketplace vs IaaS... It was more just that looking at the console jogged my memory in a visual way and I do believe there are axes on which AWS doesn't compete well in the long run, i.e., offerings where price is not the primary consideration.
- tech_man7 7y ago
  good article. Have you seen what Golem (https://golem.network/ https://golem.network/) has done in terms of crowdsourcing compute power and creating a marketplace?
zxcmx 7y ago
A frequently overlooked aspect in enterprise is billing, accounting and supplier agreement overhead. In enterprise, Joe developer can often add / use more AWS services and it just goes on the giant enterprise bill, no questions asked. If you want to use a third party service, waay more work. Supplier assessment needs to be done (by the department that does that) looking at security, company stability, data sovereignty etc. Procurement get involved to negotiate supplier agreement with the vendor and your project needs a specific budget line item which might require a trip to accounting. To get signoff and justify your vendor selection you might also have to do a stupid internal evaluation thing / bakeoff (even though of course you know the thing you really want) where you build feature matrix and carefully adjust the rows so your preferred vendor gets the most ticks. All this paperwork can take weeks or months. While a lot of the AWS service offerings are sub-par compared to alternatives, the technical work of papering over this is usually less risky than dealing with all the internal departments which will delay your project if you try to use another vendor. I think this is a big driver towards bundling being a win for them.
- user5994461 7y ago
  >>> While a lot of the AWS service offerings are sub-par compared to alternatives If you try to get some services in an entreprise, maybe a physical server or get a database, you may easily find that it takes months of paperwork and waiting. Then it's poorly operated and broken half of the time (why are they provisioning a hundred databases on a single shared host? or using a shared NAS as storage?) AWS services may not be perfect but it's miles ahead from the shitty services you get in an enterprise.
- caseymarquis 7y ago
  Heck, I work at a 20 person company and this is still generally true. No one is stopping me from using a new service, but using AWS means no new paperwork and no questions. Actionable advice on this would be: If you're B2B, have an option for yearly billing via invoice. Billing yearly via invoice vs a monthly direct debit means our finance people deal with payment, and just ask Engineering once a year if they should pay this weird bill they got. Billing via direct debit means I have to do paperwork every month. I don't enjoy things like paperwork. I do enjoy things like building a single customer MVP version of your service on AWS in a couple hours. You can guess which I'm going to choose if you don't offer yearly billing.
  - fierarul 7y ago
    Seems a bit risky to wait a whole year to collect what's due. I don't believe I ever heard of yearly invoicing like this. Of course, if your small company would like to pre-pay towards an approximation of your early invoice I'm pretty sure some company would be accommodating.
    - caseymarquis 7y ago
      I figured paying for a year up front was implied.
      - iakh 7y ago
        Not sure how that could work since most services are based on consumption
tempsolution 7y ago
AFAIK, I can't remember an instance where AWS raised prices. So if they were to undercut someone in prices, they would not be able to raise them again, so I find this scenario unlikely to happen.
halbritt 7y ago
Historically, AWS hasn't done this. They haven't lowered prices on RDS, Elasticsearch, etc. There are far superior options available. The lock-in on billing explains the adoption of these services, but there a tremendous number of accounts of folks struggling to make any of the secondary services scale worth a damn.

MuffinFlavored 7y ago

A 1GB hosted Redis instance is $40/mo on Azure (which I’m told is competitive with AWS/GCP) yet a “bare-metal” instance with 1GB of memory (in which you can configure to run Redis yourself) is $5/mo. Are all hosted infrastructure prices this inflated?

parhamn 7y ago
Backups, configuration and failover. Which traditionally meant a db guy or an ops guy which costs money. I've done it for multiple database technologies and doing it right is not at all easy or cheap on time. With that said, Kubernetes might fix this because they have access to more parts of the system in a generic API. With tech like KubeDB[1] and other operators[2] we might see these prices coming closer to bare-metal. [1] https://kubedb.com/ https://kubedb.com/ [2] https://github.com/zalando/postgres-operator https://github.com/zalando/postgres-operator
- MuffinFlavored 7y ago
  Does running Postgres in a container hurt performance?
  - Nullabillity 7y ago
    Not inherently, but if you want to use provisioned storage then your storage driver[0] will have some cost (unless you use local storage). Of course, if you're on AWS then you'd be paying the EBS tax either way. [0]: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/storage/storage-classes/#provisioner https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/storage/storage-classes/...
  - ec109685 7y ago
    No.
    - ci5er 7y ago
      It used to be unreliable. Is it not now?

jorblumesea 7y ago

> some of their offerings shift from being best-in-class to being very reliable and with a ‘just-ok-but-well-integrated’ user experience. I would go further and say that some of their experiences are buggy and often non-functional. Ever tried to search for a service in ECS? The results load from the backend, and it's a frontend based search on the backend set. Meaning it will say your service does not exist, but you're only searching on that page * offset. Then there's the Elastisearch fiasco... https://spun.io/2019/10/10/aws-elasticsearch-a-fundamentally-flawed-offering/ https://spun.io/2019/10/10/aws-elasticsearch-a-fundamentally... There are many examples where basic AWS functionality is broken.

parhamn 7y ago

One major thing this doesn't consider is the technical limitations which are latency & bandwidth. (1) You save a ton of money on bandwidth when you move data from AWS to AWS (2) Your stack, in most cases, needs to be near each other to minimize latency. Databases get wrecked by this. This is why, cloud database providers have to often transparently show you which cloud you're launching on [1] which effectively means AWS is going to get a good share of it anyway. My uninformed guess is that EC2&S3 are by far their biggest money maker which is going to be what unbundlers target. I'm all for the unbundling and will probably take part in some of it, but I don't think it will be that easy. [1] https://www.cockroachlabs.com/product/cockroachcloud https://www.cockroachlabs.com/product/cockroachcloud

jnwatson 7y ago
Bandwidth/latency was my first thought too. Still, for higher-level services, it is entirely possible to compete with AWS running on lower-level AWS infrastructure, rendering the network issues moot.
whoevercares 7y ago
Well any other AWS service almost exclusively built on top of EC2/S3, so it’s safe to say it drives all of AWS revenue either directly or indirectly. Probably some service’s use EC2 instance hours as its revenue measure
- zwkrt 7y ago
  I think the real moneymaker is that AWS keeps making their servers more efficient but doesn’t lower their costs
  - stornetn 7y ago
    Isn’t AWS fairly widely reputed for having lowered its prices dozens of times since first launching? https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/new-research-from-tso-logic-shows-aws-costs-get-lower-every-year/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/new-research-from-tso-logic...
7y ago

buboard 7y ago

LAMP was a simple stack. It was performant, and not bloated. That's why 1000 different datacenters could provide the same service. Are there such sub-bundles in AWS that are cheap enough to run without amazon's scale ? Do people even need that huge scaling capability or is AWS just convenient?

Demiurge 7y ago
I honestly don’t get this myself. I understand AWS for a fast moving startup, but I’m seeing friends start hobby projects that will never need more than one $5/m shared dedicated host, and pay $60/m for worse performance.
- kelp 7y ago
  Personally I use DigitalOcean for this sort of thing. But this is why AWS has Lightsail https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/ https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/ to service that use case and then let people upgrade later to full AWS.
- mattbillenstein 7y ago
  They're doing that to learn AWS!

cj 7y ago

Hm, I don’t think the craigslist analogy works. For the same reason it’s difficult to argue there’s opportunity for “unbundling Facebook” by launching a new image sharing service, building a news aggregator to compete with newsfeed, building a new messaging app to compete with Messenger, etc. The main reason I disagree with the premise is security / compliance requirements of large customers (a large percentage of the market). The largest purchasers of AWS-like services prefer to work with as few vendors as necessary to minimize the number of vendors they need to worry about during security audits, contracting, etc. The other obvious problem is, similar to Facebook, AWS has a “network effect”, in that all AWS services live in the same physical data centers, which results in potentially competing services suffering from higher latency than “native AWS” services which might make it harder to compete. Consumers did not have the same level of loyalty to Craigslist as business have to AWS.

vegardx 7y ago

There's definitively a market for unbundling services from Amazon, but the problem is that people forget what the actual killer feature of AWS is; IAM and Instance Metadata Service.

aflag 7y ago
Can you elaborate? After your comment I started thinking I must not really get IAM.
- Terretta 7y ago
  IAM = dynamic role based access to and among all your things, through policy-as-code. If you just Allow: *, you might not care. If you practice least privilege, this is hard to do another way.

awinder 7y ago

Kind-of alluded to in the article, but if you’re going to unbundle AWS, you’re going to have to figure out how to get the bandwidth 0-rated. One of amazons biggest moats (imo) is that they can realize monumental cost savings on bandwidth while making it very pricy to other service providers. So if you need to architect bandwidth-hungry or “high scale” applications, going outside of AWS becomes way too expensive. Even privatelink tacks on bandwidth charges. You’d have to look at DB providers like Elastic to see how to do this, I think. But it’s going to involve a very complex and high touch deployment & support environment. This effectively “prices out” certain classes of applications as too expensive for value returned. Again I could be looking at this very wrong, and figuring out how to build profitable unbundled AWS services would be a great business, but it’s hard to see how to successfully execute.

EGreg 7y ago
I think the Cloud is a result of a gradual move towards centralization of networked software built by software developers living in countries where DSL and cable broadband was rolled it early. It was a bit like mainframe developers back in the day. I remember people discussing “fat clients” vs “thin clients”. We forgot what it’s like to have dialup, and the innovative generation of decentralized software protocols (IRC, Usenet etc) faded into obscurity. Even Email and the Web are now centralized! Well the companies won and now we have a feudal kingdom again where we are the data-serfs. We have been well-trained like pavlov’s dogs using notifications and rewards (likes, comments) to till the datafields and plant fresh crops, use our social capital to reshare articles etc. And you know that you’re a serf when that notification lights up on your master’s device and you pause talking to your girlfriend, wife or child to look at it and maybe act on it. And of course governments love having a central place they can implement censorship and spy on everyone. This has got to stop. It’s not just a technological topology problem, it’s become a sociological problem and even a problem of democracy and society. THE SOLUTION IS OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE that will disrupt the landlords of the Web (Facebook, Google, Amazon etc.) as much as the Web once disrupted the landlords of the Internet (AOL, MSN, Compuserve). The first HTTP browsers weren’t better than AOL at anything except one thing... ANYONE could permissionlessly host a web browser. What realistic alternatives do we have to Facebook today? Google Docs? That anyone can easily host and share stuff with friends to easily collaborate? It would have to have people’s identity and contacts stay consistent across domains, without owning them and storing them on centralized servers like Facebook. I know a few attempts. Diaspora, Solid, Mastodon and Matrix. I also liked Sandstorm a lot, and OwnCloud was ok. They have not reached mass adoption. Scuttlebutt is slightly better in that it can interoperate with everything. The biggest winner in the last few years has been the DID standard, although it solves one problem only. There is also an innovative project called MaidSAFE which raised around $10M and spent 12 years so far building this back-end. I have high hopes for it once it is released and plan to make Qbix Platform interoperate with it. Check it out: https://maidsafe.net/ https://maidsafe.net/ We will eventually replace the idea of a startup running a database that has to scale, with an open source startup that releases software that anyone can pay any hosting company to run and makes money via tokens. That was the dream of cryptocurrency. The first kind of startup extracts rents via a SAAS model and forcibly bundles infrastructure management (Slack, Salesforce, Twitter, Etsy, you name it). The other doesn’t care about cheaper “cloud” costs so much, because anyone can host it (Wordpress, Magento, Drupal etc.) and the hosting costs are miniscule for each individual client business. Wordpress and Magento and Drupal are all valued in the billions, as open source companies. Maybe people on HN should strive for this rather than “Zero to One” “competition is for losers” “build a monopoly and extract rents” Peter Thiel style facebook startups. Do we need something like this? Or am I just ranting? EDIT: why whenever I post this subject, it is heavily downvoted with no actual replies or explanations showing me why my position is wrong? Is there a coordinated effort to downvote this position without further engaging with it?

yellow_lead 7y ago

> There are obvious differences between Craigslist and AWS. The most important is that Craigslist (and each of the category spawn) is a marketplace, and so has the powerful advantage of network effects. Isn't AWS also a marketplace?

elcomet 7y ago
No. It's only amazon selling services, not everyone. Amazon is a service provider.
- cthalupa 7y ago
  This is... Kind of true, kind of false. The AMI marketplace is probably the biggest and most long running example of a marketplace where others are selling services (software licenses/support), but privatelink allows people to make a SaaS and not only sell it on a marketplace on AWS, but also do so with an endpoint in your VPC so you don't have to go out over the public internet. I have no idea how well utilized that sort of thing is, so in reality it might be similar to there not being an option in the first place, and I'm sure in general Amazon sells far far far more services themselves, but it is possible for people besides Amazon to sell services on AWS.

EGreg 7y ago

Most profits are obtained by bundling closed-source or costly infrastructure together with stuff that is cheap but inseparable from it, so you can extract rents. That’s why open source unleashes an explosion in innovation.

jakozaur 7y ago

1. AWS got business advantage of buying 100+ services at once, without going through procurement, invoicing, GDPR Data Processing Agreements, on/off boarding, same support, good security and uptime, credibility of keeping backward compatibility for decades etc. There should be open platform that would eliminate that advantage. 2. EC2 and S3 when used properly would be harder to beat. You can get reserved discounts, spot, elasticity... Moving them would require paying for bandwidth which easily makes playing field uneven. 3. The higher layer of services CloudWatch, ElasticSearch, Cognito got much higher margins, yet lacking functionality and quality. Much easier targets for disruption.

angry_octet 7y ago

Once you have significant data on AWS it costs you so much to transfer it you are stuck with them. Their data fees are insane, and so are their storage fees. Also, AWS is slow. If I have a filer with 500TB of disk I should be getting 5-10GiBy/s reads, and burst writes should be that fast too. With EFS I get 200MiBy/s MAX. Likewise EBS and emphemeral SSDs top out at 250MiBy/s, which is just abysmal. AWS security is so complicated now, at the control plane layer, that hardly anyone understands it. So if there was a competitor that gave real hardware performance and a simpler security validation at a reasonable price, they could win business. But I don't see Oracle/Azure/GCP etc doing that.

adreamingsoul 7y ago
What would you be willing to pay for “physical like” performance?
- msjyoo 7y ago
  Physical-like prices?
  - nine_k 7y ago
    Yes, which are mostly SRE salaries.
  - qes 7y ago
    What happens when the SSD in your colo server malfunctions? What happens when the (an) SSD attached to your cloud VM malfunctions? Why do you think those two setups should cost the same?
    - vidarh 7y ago
      Because it happens at a low enough frequency that dealing with it at places I've managed physical racks is pretty much a rounding error relative to the hardware costs. And AWS has other complexities, so the devops costs with AWS are different, but rarely lower than managing physical hardware. I'd never pick AWS based on total cost - it's an expensive convenience that first starts to pay off in terms of cost once you're big enough to negotiate huge discounts. If you can afford it, it's great, but a lot of people who use AWS have no idea how much of a premium they pay for it.

jeswin 7y ago

> As an early stage investor, I’m hard-pressed to name any tectonic shifts that have had as much impact on startup formation. Gross exaggeration. Most startups should worry less about 100% uptime and scaling than about sales. A dedicated server or two goes a long way, and it isn't/wasn't really that much harder.

scarface74 7y ago
It’s really crazy the myopia I see with posts like this. I’ve worked in the B2B space mostly in healthcare.. When you get a sale to business where they are outsourcing a major piece of their functionality to you. You can’t shrug and not worry about uptime. If you’re building Twitter it doesn’t matter.
- jeswin 7y ago
  > It’s really crazy the myopia I see with posts like this. I said "most startups", not critical medical care. I've dealt with startups for nearly two decades and most startups can begin operations without the cloud, and with the possibility of downtime. Even in healthcare there are plenty of systems where varying levels of downtime is acceptable.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    In any small B2B company where your business is based on a few big spenders, uptime is important. If you lose one customer you lose a noticeable share of revenue.
    - adrianmsmith 7y ago
      The assumption there is that if you're down, you'll lose the customer. But that depends on the industry. At least in one industry I've worked in (B2B accountancy and reporting software), the product can be down for a day and it doesn't matter. A few employees at the customer are using our software to produce monthly reports, and if they have to wait until the next day to produce the reports, they're annoyed but they can get on with other work in the meantime. I mean, for sure, it's not ideal, and you'll get emails to complain, but so far nobody has cancelled on us due to something like that. I'm not saying I like the product being down, but I can understand the CEO not wanting to pay extra to invest in redundant infrastructure, it's probably the correct business decision.

streetcat1 7y ago

The analogy in the article is wrong. Aws is not a marketplace and does not enjoy network effects. I.e. if developer A uses AWS, this does not affect developer B. What AWS enjoy is economy of scale (huge capex) which should help reduce price (but I am not sure that this is happening), and being first to market (Nobody got fired for choosing IBM). Basically the main value prop today, as I see it, is saving the operation costs (human cost), by offloading them to amazon. This will be solved by Kubernetes operators. Moreover, most of the new computational intensive workload (E.g. IOT / AI ) is better done on the edge.

cocktailpeanuts 7y ago
There are more than one type of network effects. This one is called "Indirect network effect". What you have written is direct network effect. As more developers start using AWS, there forms a large developer ecosystem around AWS tools and services, and therefore "developer B" will find it much easier and cheaper to use AWS, indirectly.
- streetcat1 7y ago
  So they will not find it much cheaper. AWS is priced that same regardless. They might enjoy knowledge sharing, but at the speed that AWS evolves, the half-life of such knowledge is very short. If I would bet on anything it would be Kubernetes. At least my knowledge is the same across clouds/on-prem. And there is no gatekeeper.
  - nickbauman 7y ago
    Except the technical complexity. I work with some very experienced k8s devops engineers these days and they screw up catastrophically every so often because of the million switches and buttons on k8s.
    - streetcat1 7y ago
      Right. Kubernetes is supposed to be managed by machines not by humans.

awinter-py 7y ago

author's focus on datadog & metrics tools as the place to innovate is a smart way in in particular, declarative dashboards (from code) and declarative alerts (from code) would make my life a lot easier feedback-based / ML alerting thresholds might also hit the spot -- this is an area where black box isn't safe enough and some innovation is needed getting any piece of information from datadog or amzn / goog's in-house dashboards is like pulling teeth -- they're so slow and clunky

dustingetz 7y ago

In the tech circles I hang out we think of AWS as the next operating system. In 10-15 years it will be mostly invisible to the application programmer due to abstractions built on top of it. This is a new frontier for startups.

heavenlyblue 7y ago
That is very true. It is an operating system now.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
peterwwillis 7y ago
But it's way more than an operating system, it's managed. K8s is a kit car, AWS is a Toyota with a warranty. I agree that the future is distributed operating systems. I think we desperately need to load in the core features of a D-OS into Linux for it to stay relevant, or a competitive startup will create a tailored environment for programmers that will not even be recognizable as Linux, yet it will be used everywhere because of its ubiquity. (Docker, anyone?) For example, Terraform is kind of garbage usability-wise, but it just works with every cloud provider feature you can think of; it's a no-brainer. If a D-OS also naturally bundled hooks for every single feature of every managed cloud provider, along with a simplified way to hook custom applications and bundle the whole thing, literally everyone would use it for all their apps and run it everywhere.
qaq 7y ago
alternatively in 15 years there will be less than 0.01% workloads that a mainstream 2-way Epyc XXXX Server with 512 physical cores 64TB RAM and 10,000,000 IOPS will not handle so 90% of cloud services will become meaningless :).
- Terretta 7y ago
  > 90% of cloud services will become meaningless As will that Epyc XXXX server, absent a well-peered and hardened services mesh for it to plug into. Cloud shouldn’t be used for just someone else’s computer. It’s not the compute or the storage, it’s the network.

jpalomaki 7y ago

It is usually easier to dump costs to the already hefty AWS bill than push a completely new service provider through procurement process.

bassamtabbara 7y ago

I made a similar argument [1][2] about tipping the cloud computing market from vertical to horizontal integration. One important aspect of this transformation is to maintain the feel of an integrated cloud provider, and not let the customer/end-user deal with the cost of heterogeneity [3]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOssXrkNYxM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOssXrkNYxM [2] https://speakerdeck.com/bassam/opening-up-the-cloud-with-crossplane https://speakerdeck.com/bassam/opening-up-the-cloud-with-cro... [3] https://crossplane.io https://crossplane.io

chx 7y ago

https://twitter.com/br_/status/979442438254166016 https://twitter.com/br_/status/979442438254166016 > "selling AWS at a loss" is crisp shorthand for a lot of startups' business models!

ksec 7y ago

How does the Unbundling work if the Services you are Unbundling runs on AWS? I dont understand how Craglist and AWS relates? Craglist.... is a .. list or a market place. AWS is literally like a Fortune 2000 business that is in itself fully vertically integrated from Hardware to Software and Network. And then you have economy of scale, and Good enough is enemy of Best. The barrier of Entry to recreate Craglist is less than a rounding error in recreating AWS or even any part of its sub component. I dont have any numbers to back me up on this, so take this with the biggest grain of salt. I do think there is a Market for provider that sits underneath AWS or GCP, something like DigitalOcean. AWS or GCP are like Enterprise product with millions of features being offered to all, while DO is like a simple to use product that is scaling up its feature offering. And it offers the essential of Cloud Hosting with Better experience. ( Comparatively Speaking ) Or Heroku with their own Infrastructure, ( or Cheaper Pricing )

noway421 7y ago

another point: you don't pay for services you don't use, so AWS is not "bundled" to begin with. you get to pick and choose. in such a model, i don't see any benefit in fragmentation tbh.

hartror 7y ago

I've not come across the term JAMstack before, why doesn't this make sense for using with AWS as the author suggests?

unraveller 7y ago
AWS is best for big projects with lots of data processing in different ways that need scale, that's what all the features are for. JAMstack usually implies a simple text API which you could use on AWS AppSync for example but there are much simpler horizontal alternatives since a tiny websocket server can handle many 100,000s of users.

dana321 7y ago

AWS is expensive for what it is. I really don't understand the hype machine around what they provide, since openstack has been around for a few years.

spicyramen 7y ago

One missing point is the support for customers and partners. AWS and Azure provide amazing support experience which emulates and improve what Cisco, HP, IBM did in the Enterprise space many years before: TAC, Forums, certifications, partner ecosystem. When you have an issue someone will actually respond to it. I was interested in Google Cloud but their support was non-existent, seems to be that their leadership came from the consumer world where a person is just dumb and their product is always perfect. Specifically I had an issue with Firebase which I found the answer on Stackoverflow eventually (app was down for few hours because Google blacklist my environment by mistake). Since my company relies on high availability, we needed to work from day 0 with AWS on the design and have a person which would be available to respond to queries directly. Looks like with new Google CEO that's changing but just cares about large enterprises . With that in mind AWS and Azure to me will become a binary option.

0xkalle 7y ago

Small note: I wouldn't count the serverless framework as cloud agnostic. Yes you can use the framework for all major clouds but you have to adjust your project for that. Serverless does not abstract the events, function context or other service APIs which would be needed if it would be really cloud agnostic = you can deploy your project to different providers without changes.

overgard 7y ago

A lot of the value of AWS is its integration within itself. (even if it can be full of rough edges). I think the danger with unbundling is that your competing project needs to be clearly so much better that people are going to be willing to go through the hassle of configuring a lot of complicated networking to work with what they already have, along with separate billing etc. Not saying it can't be done, but it means the barrier to entry is really really high. You're not just convincing them your service is better, you're also convincing them that it's so much better that they should be willing to take on extra headaches for it. If I were to compete with aws, I think the area I'd really go after them with is better kubernetes support. I've yet to see any cloud provider really do it well, to be honest (which isn't surprising, development on kubernetes moves so fast and it's so advanced, it's kind of amazing, but that does mean it's really hard to make it nice outside of a "works for a demo" kind of deal). Azure and GCP do kubernetes a little bit better, but I think if someone were to come in and say, like, I don't know, we can do kubernetes on bare metal so it's much faster than through a VM, and all our services are natively integrated, that would be a cool story. The other area I might compete with AWS is in finding niches where organizations might be hesitant to build an operations department, but they really need cloud computing. So, for instance, maybe scientific computing or something like that. If you could make a really useful cloud that can be administered by someone who barely knows linux, that could be a thing.