7 ms·

So let me get this straight: Amazon packages open source software (Linux, Postgres etc) in a way that is an abstracted service (RDS, EBS, Elastic Load Balancer

by dakna 7y ago

So let me get this straight: Amazon packages open source software (Linux, Postgres etc) in a way that is an abstracted service (RDS, EBS, Elastic Load Balancer). They add so many abstracted building blocks that you need a special skill set to manage them (Aws Certified Solutions Architect) instead of knowing how to do this with bare metal or a container image running in your own data center. And now that things are complicated and developers might make mistakes using those services, they add a profiler that inspects your code running in production and a reviewer that ties into the stage before deployment. All just to optimize the use of their own services. From a business perspective this is an awesome way to get vendor lock-in to a much higher degree. They are basically the certifying authority that tells you if your intellectual property (your code) conforms to their own standard. Yes, they show examples of standard Java optimizations, but it clearly says it detects deviation from best practices for using AWS APIs and SDKs. And people were mad at Microsoft for shipping a non standards compliant browser as default and enriching it with HTML tags and plugins that would only work in that browser. Little did we know. I personally wait for the "Amazon Compliant Code" label in the not too distant future as a selling point for business people.

Thorentis 7y ago
> "Amazon Compliant Code" label Wow, this is a scary but very real thought. Though, the "Certified Windows XP / 7" stickers on hardware and video games / other software was quite common back in the day and isn't too dissimilar. I would argue that the level of vendor lock-in Amazon is going for is far greater than Microsoft's.
sheeshkebab 7y ago
Maybe at some point there will be an antitrust lawsuit to unbundle them - and say have compute or storage be provided by a different vendor, all from within their aws management console.
- ken 7y ago
  I don't care if AWS is big and bundled as long as they use standard interfaces. Linux is big and it doesn't really matter that there's not much competition. I don't care what system (or even virtual machines or containers) runs my program. If there were an open standard for "way to upload and store and serve files on the web", and S3 happened to implement that standard, and other companies and open-source projects did as well, then it wouldn't matter to me if AWS was the bundling king or not. There was nothing magical about the design of Unix, either. It's not the only way to make an operating system, or even the best way. It survived because we got many competing implementations which were basically source-compatible. It really took off when we got free clones that anyone could run on their PC.
  - didibus 7y ago
    At this point, S3 IS the standard for that. And Google's and Microsoft's offering all mimic that API. This could happen for all other of their services.
    - apocalyptic0n3 7y ago
      Not just Google and MS, many smaller services too. Linode and Digital Ocean's object storage both use an S3-compatible API and a number of open source, self-hosted services do as well from what I have seen. The S3 API is the defacto standard at this point.
seibelj 7y ago
Amazon has made scalable, performant, high-availability systems constructable by a 10 person team that serves millions or even billions of people. Before AWS it took thousands of people and billions in capital investment to do so. Sure, google and Microsoft and IBM joined the party, but AWS was first and remains the best holistically. This is their moment of domination, and eventually something will knock them down, but they have made so many companies so nimble and powerful in ways that were impossible before. Go Amazon.
- chance_state 7y ago
  >Before AWS it took thousands of people and billions in capital investment to do so. Could you expand on this? I can't tell if you mean to launch a service/company or if you're talking about some large scale.. thing.. I haven't heard of.
  - dumbfoundded 7y ago
    Instagram comes to mind. 13 employees and $1B acquisition. Hard to imagine that without AWS.
    - jakear 7y ago
      WhatsApp? Similar story, no AWS.
      - dumbfoundded 7y ago
        Well, WhatsApp was started by industry experts in scaling. If you're making a point about functional programming, I'd tend to agree but from a business perspective I'd look to why Netflix still uses AWS: https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Netflix-still-use-AWS https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Netflix-still-use-AWS
        gurrone 7y ago
        Still they place FreeBSD running on prem hardware in the ISP PoPs as a caching layer because it absolutely makes sense. https://papers.freebsd.org/2019/FOSDEM/looney-Netflix_and_FreeBSD.files/FOSDEM_2019_Netflix_and_FreeBSD.pdf https://papers.freebsd.org/2019/FOSDEM/looney-Netflix_and_Fr...
didibus 7y ago
I'm not saying lock in doesn't exist. But I can't really envision how you would design a full cloud offering without vendor lock in of some sort? Beyond offering all services as open source so you can run them on your own data-center. I'm being serious, how do you design an API and a set of distributed intercommunicating systems in a way that doesn't couple you with their specific APIs, communication channels and semantics? I don't think it's possible. I can see suggesting using open source solutions instead that you run on your own, but that still couples you to those specific solutions, except they're open source so in theory you could fork it and have more control over them. I get that. But this is a different argument I feel. Since the cost of maintaining these open source products on your own is high, and the cost of switching to a different open source solution is as much as moving to another cloud provider. I think the only form of lock in right now that might seem designed by the business, and not an artifact of the tech itself, is the high price of exporting your data out.
- phillipcarter 7y ago
  Lock-in is unavoidable with the cloud and cloud vendors - but I think the issue here is the degree of lock-in and the way people get there. This sort of stuff by AWS is very clearly seen as luring people in with OSS, industry standard, vendor-neutral technologies and then pulling a fast one on them. Whether or not that's the _actual_ goal I can't say, but I can see how it looks that way.
- dakna 7y ago
  The fact that millions of people were able to read this message almost instantly after it was written, without knowing anything about the device it was written or the location it is coming from, shows it is possible to decouple specifics and adhere to open standards for all players involved. There is just no incentive to do that for what AWS provides. It is a cash cow, exactly because of how useful it is if you have this set of problems they solve. I think AWS is basically a large SaaS that sells you solutions to problems you have at scale. I don't think the lock in is only in the effort to export data, the lock in is also that a company will use the same building blocks for every new project or new feature on existing projects because their current staff is already trained and new hires don't know how to do it without those services either. So just like in the 90's nobody got fired for buying IBM, today nobody gets fired for using AWS, even though they don't have problems at the scale AWS is great at.
danhhieu910 7y ago
It's not that evil. The first time used AWS, I really enjoyed the power and easy to set up the whole system from scratch everything (network, servers....) If it's on-premise, it'd cost a ton of effort of a lot of ppl. AWS is not that's hard, the console + UI is user friendly and they have a great document site so you don't really need to get these AWS's certs (I had one about 3-4 years and honestly the information in these tests are not helpful, rarely 1 people need to remember a lot of details in 20+ services of amazon, whenever you want to use one just start reading document about it). A new service from AWS - that's great. At least that is a new option for end user.
adreamingsoul 7y ago
Yep.

by dakna 7y ago

Thorentis 7y ago

> "Amazon Compliant Code" label Wow, this is a scary but very real thought. Though, the "Certified Windows XP / 7" stickers on hardware and video games / other software was quite common back in the day and isn't too dissimilar. I would argue that the level of vendor lock-in Amazon is going for is far greater than Microsoft's.

sheeshkebab 7y ago

Maybe at some point there will be an antitrust lawsuit to unbundle them - and say have compute or storage be provided by a different vendor, all from within their aws management console.

ken 7y ago
I don't care if AWS is big and bundled as long as they use standard interfaces. Linux is big and it doesn't really matter that there's not much competition. I don't care what system (or even virtual machines or containers) runs my program. If there were an open standard for "way to upload and store and serve files on the web", and S3 happened to implement that standard, and other companies and open-source projects did as well, then it wouldn't matter to me if AWS was the bundling king or not. There was nothing magical about the design of Unix, either. It's not the only way to make an operating system, or even the best way. It survived because we got many competing implementations which were basically source-compatible. It really took off when we got free clones that anyone could run on their PC.
- didibus 7y ago
  At this point, S3 IS the standard for that. And Google's and Microsoft's offering all mimic that API. This could happen for all other of their services.
  - apocalyptic0n3 7y ago
    Not just Google and MS, many smaller services too. Linode and Digital Ocean's object storage both use an S3-compatible API and a number of open source, self-hosted services do as well from what I have seen. The S3 API is the defacto standard at this point.

seibelj 7y ago

Amazon has made scalable, performant, high-availability systems constructable by a 10 person team that serves millions or even billions of people. Before AWS it took thousands of people and billions in capital investment to do so. Sure, google and Microsoft and IBM joined the party, but AWS was first and remains the best holistically. This is their moment of domination, and eventually something will knock them down, but they have made so many companies so nimble and powerful in ways that were impossible before. Go Amazon.

chance_state 7y ago
>Before AWS it took thousands of people and billions in capital investment to do so. Could you expand on this? I can't tell if you mean to launch a service/company or if you're talking about some large scale.. thing.. I haven't heard of.
- dumbfoundded 7y ago
  Instagram comes to mind. 13 employees and $1B acquisition. Hard to imagine that without AWS.
  - jakear 7y ago
    WhatsApp? Similar story, no AWS.
    - dumbfoundded 7y ago
      Well, WhatsApp was started by industry experts in scaling. If you're making a point about functional programming, I'd tend to agree but from a business perspective I'd look to why Netflix still uses AWS: https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Netflix-still-use-AWS https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Netflix-still-use-AWS
      - gurrone 7y ago
        Still they place FreeBSD running on prem hardware in the ISP PoPs as a caching layer because it absolutely makes sense. https://papers.freebsd.org/2019/FOSDEM/looney-Netflix_and_FreeBSD.files/FOSDEM_2019_Netflix_and_FreeBSD.pdf https://papers.freebsd.org/2019/FOSDEM/looney-Netflix_and_Fr...

didibus 7y ago

I'm not saying lock in doesn't exist. But I can't really envision how you would design a full cloud offering without vendor lock in of some sort? Beyond offering all services as open source so you can run them on your own data-center. I'm being serious, how do you design an API and a set of distributed intercommunicating systems in a way that doesn't couple you with their specific APIs, communication channels and semantics? I don't think it's possible. I can see suggesting using open source solutions instead that you run on your own, but that still couples you to those specific solutions, except they're open source so in theory you could fork it and have more control over them. I get that. But this is a different argument I feel. Since the cost of maintaining these open source products on your own is high, and the cost of switching to a different open source solution is as much as moving to another cloud provider. I think the only form of lock in right now that might seem designed by the business, and not an artifact of the tech itself, is the high price of exporting your data out.

phillipcarter 7y ago
Lock-in is unavoidable with the cloud and cloud vendors - but I think the issue here is the degree of lock-in and the way people get there. This sort of stuff by AWS is very clearly seen as luring people in with OSS, industry standard, vendor-neutral technologies and then pulling a fast one on them. Whether or not that's the _actual_ goal I can't say, but I can see how it looks that way.
dakna 7y ago
The fact that millions of people were able to read this message almost instantly after it was written, without knowing anything about the device it was written or the location it is coming from, shows it is possible to decouple specifics and adhere to open standards for all players involved. There is just no incentive to do that for what AWS provides. It is a cash cow, exactly because of how useful it is if you have this set of problems they solve. I think AWS is basically a large SaaS that sells you solutions to problems you have at scale. I don't think the lock in is only in the effort to export data, the lock in is also that a company will use the same building blocks for every new project or new feature on existing projects because their current staff is already trained and new hires don't know how to do it without those services either. So just like in the 90's nobody got fired for buying IBM, today nobody gets fired for using AWS, even though they don't have problems at the scale AWS is great at.

danhhieu910 7y ago

It's not that evil. The first time used AWS, I really enjoyed the power and easy to set up the whole system from scratch everything (network, servers....) If it's on-premise, it'd cost a ton of effort of a lot of ppl. AWS is not that's hard, the console + UI is user friendly and they have a great document site so you don't really need to get these AWS's certs (I had one about 3-4 years and honestly the information in these tests are not helpful, rarely 1 people need to remember a lot of details in 20+ services of amazon, whenever you want to use one just start reading document about it). A new service from AWS - that's great. At least that is a new option for end user.

adreamingsoul 7y ago

Yep.