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I think AWS is early to offer a not-yet-matured product just to get it in front of customers and start gathering real usage feedback. I’d consider dynamo a fant

I think AWS is early to offer a not-yet-matured product just to get it in front of customers and start gathering real usage feedback. I’d consider dynamo a fantastic tier 1 service, but it wasn’t always that way. This is inline with the Amazon philosophy in general. As for “making something for the sake of having it”, I believe the key reason for building their own applications is that they can build it on the same multi-az incremental ledger/block store that underlies most services (first built for aurora), or a variant thereof. They have some pretty stellar underlying tech built to be reliable at cloud scale, something you won’t get from running a service on your own EC2 fleet. The new stuff built on top of it just isn’t all that mature though. That’s just my take though. If interested, the deep dive talk from reinvent last year on aurora is pretty cool. Disclaimer: I work at Amazon, nothing to do with AWS or timestream. In fact, I’ve been excited for time stream for a while but found its initial performance lackluster for what I needed.

ramraj07 6y ago
Which deepdive talk are you recommending?
- manigandham 6y ago
  AWS re:Invent 2019: [REPEAT 1] Amazon Aurora storage demystified: How it all works (DAT309-R1): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrtwAOND1Pc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrtwAOND1Pc But all of the Deep Dive talks are good for technical details: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=aws+reinvent+2019+deep+dive https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=aws+reinvent+20...
cheesgrateron 6y ago
>I think AWS is early to offer a not-yet-matured product just to get it in front of customers and start gathering real usage feedback. It's not just this. In many cases, the services launched are essentially MVPs that were only created to serve a handful of customers' needs. If a huge whale of a customer says they want hosted Jupyter notebooks on AWS (just a theoretical example I picked because I saw someone criticize Sagemaker, but I don't have any specific knowledge of Sagemaker), then AWS will create that for them, but, AWS doesn't actually do "one off" services for a specific customer, so they will also launch those hosted notebooks as a public service. The result is of course that this service was built with one customer's use case in mind, so it might not serve other customers' use cases very well, which leads to some negative perception. But ideally AWS then goes and incorporates feedback into the service, turning it into a "tier 1" service rather than an MVP. It just takes time.
- kenhwang 6y ago
  I used to work for one of AWS's biggest customers. This was 100% how we operated, we told AWS what we wanted them to solve, and they would build it for us. When we're done closed beta testing it and getting changes in, it gets released as a public service a year later or so.
bmurphy1976 6y ago
They are also incentivized to do it because it makes AWS sticky. The more of their services you use, the harder it is to migrate somewhere else. They don't need to put out quality services, they just have to put out enough that you become dependent on one or two of them and then you're stuck.

ramraj07 6y ago

Which deepdive talk are you recommending?

manigandham 6y ago
AWS re:Invent 2019: [REPEAT 1] Amazon Aurora storage demystified: How it all works (DAT309-R1): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrtwAOND1Pc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrtwAOND1Pc But all of the Deep Dive talks are good for technical details: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=aws+reinvent+2019+deep+dive https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=aws+reinvent+20...

cheesgrateron 6y ago

>I think AWS is early to offer a not-yet-matured product just to get it in front of customers and start gathering real usage feedback. It's not just this. In many cases, the services launched are essentially MVPs that were only created to serve a handful of customers' needs. If a huge whale of a customer says they want hosted Jupyter notebooks on AWS (just a theoretical example I picked because I saw someone criticize Sagemaker, but I don't have any specific knowledge of Sagemaker), then AWS will create that for them, but, AWS doesn't actually do "one off" services for a specific customer, so they will also launch those hosted notebooks as a public service. The result is of course that this service was built with one customer's use case in mind, so it might not serve other customers' use cases very well, which leads to some negative perception. But ideally AWS then goes and incorporates feedback into the service, turning it into a "tier 1" service rather than an MVP. It just takes time.

kenhwang 6y ago
I used to work for one of AWS's biggest customers. This was 100% how we operated, we told AWS what we wanted them to solve, and they would build it for us. When we're done closed beta testing it and getting changes in, it gets released as a public service a year later or so.

bmurphy1976 6y ago

They are also incentivized to do it because it makes AWS sticky. The more of their services you use, the harder it is to migrate somewhere else. They don't need to put out quality services, they just have to put out enough that you become dependent on one or two of them and then you're stuck.