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Yes, the world certainly hasn't yet nailed this playbook. AWS has, I would contend, objectively done an incredible job in this synthesis. (How many other busine

by pc 6y ago

Yes, the world certainly hasn't yet nailed this playbook. AWS has, I would contend, objectively done an incredible job in this synthesis. (How many other businesses have grown to $40B+ of revenue with self-serve product adoption front-and-center?) But I'm sure Mike (and anyone else at AWS) would be among the first to agree that they also have things to learn and improve.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago
Yes. I once calculated that AWS is the fastest ever b2b in history. Only marginally slower than FB, which is a consumer business (and the fastest ever). One more thing I'd like to mention in this context: ask 100 people why AWS has been so successful. Think of your answer. My answer (6 years at AWS; met with ~5,000 AWS customers, so big data set): lowest barrier of entry (swipe credit card, EC2 is up in 2-3 minutes), and lowest barrier of pausing the service (and the billing). Most people would say any other thing, but not this one. In fact, EC2, S2, EBS were initially quite bad, in terms of performance or price/quality, compared to pretty much anything out there. But you needed 2 minutes to spin up an EC2 instance, vs 2-3 weeks anywhere else.
- closeparen 6y ago
  At the time EC2 became popular, self-service rental of virtual machines was already a well-established business, but it was called "VPS" instead of "cloud." Uploading source code to your provider and letting them figure out how to serve HTTP traffic from it was also a dominant pattern, but was called "shared PHP hosting" instead of "serverless." I'm not even old. But I guess most people my age probably did not have HostGator accounts when they were 11...
  - bigyikes 6y ago
    You have me beat, I don’t think I got my HostGator account until I was 13. Also not old. My girlfriend got a traditional CPanel hosting setup a couple of months ago. Being so caught up in my tech bubble, I kind of forgot such quaint things existed. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder why I’m bothering to write a service with JavaScript, fiddling with webpack, or deploying to Digital Ocean or Heroku or some other overpriced tech-hype VPS service, when I could instead simply drag and drop a .php file into FileZilla and get on with my day?
- thoraway1010 6y ago
  The other thing is trust. They have (yet) to screw customers on pricing that I've seen. Has amazon ever raised prices on an existing service? I'm not saying the prices are any good, but they don't seem to go up. So you can spin up in a few seconds, scale, stop and even invest in the platform without worrying too much. Also - they don't seem to discontinue services that quickly, again, doesn't feel like you will be screwed. I just had a call TODAY with a vendor, the price could be as low as $30/unit or $120/unit - that's a near 4x delta from sure to hell no for our use case. Sales guy needs to go talk to their manager to see if they can get us the lower pricing. And who knows if next year (it's annual) we'll again get their "manager" to sign off on the lower pricing. Something about enterprise sales folks thinking is very short term. No price transparency - maybe we can qualify and squeeze them for more per unit. Or maybe get them in low and squeeze them on renewal once they've invested. The overhead of dealing with them is so high too. Show me actual product screens (not talking heads and bullet points). By the time you get to the demo you have wasted a week of your life. So big thumbs up to AWS here. You can see baseline pricing up to huge traffic. You can see savings plans discounts up to large amounts etc.
  - fragmede 6y ago
    AWS has clear upfront pricing, but they're a large enterprise company so if you're a large customer, and you're not getting a discount, you're definitely getting screwed. No one talks about that because it's all covered by NDAs covering backroom deals, but you can be sure Netflix isn't paying list pricing for EC2 instances. Having to convert between Reserved Instance families to save money, while tricking people into thinking that this is good for them, is a masterstroke of AWS' sales department. Wouldn't you rather be working on the product rather than optimizing RI counts?
    - donor20 6y ago
      I've never felt tricked by RI. Is there some value to a cloud provider if I commit to three years of an instance type that might night have much new adoption after 1 or 2 years? I suspect so. They seemed to price based on that. What's the "trick"? Standard a1.medium instance for 3 years runs $7/month. Not unreasonable If you don't want to do that use savings plans. If you like talking to sales people and negotiating discounts do that. But they haven't let those sales people shut down / mess up self serve, including options for discounts. You can get pretty far with amazon's tiered pricing and savings plans / spot etc discounts.

by pc 6y ago

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

Yes. I once calculated that AWS is the fastest ever b2b in history. Only marginally slower than FB, which is a consumer business (and the fastest ever). One more thing I'd like to mention in this context: ask 100 people why AWS has been so successful. Think of your answer. My answer (6 years at AWS; met with ~5,000 AWS customers, so big data set): lowest barrier of entry (swipe credit card, EC2 is up in 2-3 minutes), and lowest barrier of pausing the service (and the billing). Most people would say any other thing, but not this one. In fact, EC2, S2, EBS were initially quite bad, in terms of performance or price/quality, compared to pretty much anything out there. But you needed 2 minutes to spin up an EC2 instance, vs 2-3 weeks anywhere else.

closeparen 6y ago
At the time EC2 became popular, self-service rental of virtual machines was already a well-established business, but it was called "VPS" instead of "cloud." Uploading source code to your provider and letting them figure out how to serve HTTP traffic from it was also a dominant pattern, but was called "shared PHP hosting" instead of "serverless." I'm not even old. But I guess most people my age probably did not have HostGator accounts when they were 11...
- bigyikes 6y ago
  You have me beat, I don’t think I got my HostGator account until I was 13. Also not old. My girlfriend got a traditional CPanel hosting setup a couple of months ago. Being so caught up in my tech bubble, I kind of forgot such quaint things existed. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder why I’m bothering to write a service with JavaScript, fiddling with webpack, or deploying to Digital Ocean or Heroku or some other overpriced tech-hype VPS service, when I could instead simply drag and drop a .php file into FileZilla and get on with my day?
thoraway1010 6y ago
The other thing is trust. They have (yet) to screw customers on pricing that I've seen. Has amazon ever raised prices on an existing service? I'm not saying the prices are any good, but they don't seem to go up. So you can spin up in a few seconds, scale, stop and even invest in the platform without worrying too much. Also - they don't seem to discontinue services that quickly, again, doesn't feel like you will be screwed. I just had a call TODAY with a vendor, the price could be as low as $30/unit or $120/unit - that's a near 4x delta from sure to hell no for our use case. Sales guy needs to go talk to their manager to see if they can get us the lower pricing. And who knows if next year (it's annual) we'll again get their "manager" to sign off on the lower pricing. Something about enterprise sales folks thinking is very short term. No price transparency - maybe we can qualify and squeeze them for more per unit. Or maybe get them in low and squeeze them on renewal once they've invested. The overhead of dealing with them is so high too. Show me actual product screens (not talking heads and bullet points). By the time you get to the demo you have wasted a week of your life. So big thumbs up to AWS here. You can see baseline pricing up to huge traffic. You can see savings plans discounts up to large amounts etc.
- fragmede 6y ago
  AWS has clear upfront pricing, but they're a large enterprise company so if you're a large customer, and you're not getting a discount, you're definitely getting screwed. No one talks about that because it's all covered by NDAs covering backroom deals, but you can be sure Netflix isn't paying list pricing for EC2 instances. Having to convert between Reserved Instance families to save money, while tricking people into thinking that this is good for them, is a masterstroke of AWS' sales department. Wouldn't you rather be working on the product rather than optimizing RI counts?
  - donor20 6y ago
    I've never felt tricked by RI. Is there some value to a cloud provider if I commit to three years of an instance type that might night have much new adoption after 1 or 2 years? I suspect so. They seemed to price based on that. What's the "trick"? Standard a1.medium instance for 3 years runs $7/month. Not unreasonable If you don't want to do that use savings plans. If you like talking to sales people and negotiating discounts do that. But they haven't let those sales people shut down / mess up self serve, including options for discounts. You can get pretty far with amazon's tiered pricing and savings plans / spot etc discounts.