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I wonder if Amazon’s theory here is that by offering multi-cloud support they can put decision makers at ease when choosing cloud vendors by making them feel li
by julianozen 6y ago
I wonder if Amazon’s theory here is that by offering multi-cloud support they can put decision makers at ease when choosing cloud vendors by making them feel like they’re not getting locked into AWS - but Amazon also expects most customers to mostly only use AWS out of convenience
Disclaimer - I used to work for AWS
- rory_isAdonk 6y agoIs working at AWS hellish? Or once you get in it's just a normal job? I get its heavily dependent on the team, just wondering from your perspective.
- shitlord 6y agoAWS is huge, so YMMV across teams. Some teams have operational and funding issues, so your experience there may be hellish. You could think of it another way and realize that you have your work cut out for you. I previously worked on an AWS team like this and left because I got tired of the grind. On the other hand, a lot of teams are great places to work. Before I left AWS, I worked on a really good team with intelligent co-workers and interesting engineering challenges. It was like night and day - the team was over-funded and had very few operational issues.
- rory_isAdonk 6y agoThat's great to hear. Often online all you hear are the extremes at both ends. I hear that you're basically put on PIP as soon as you join, any truth to this?
- shitlord 6y agoI was never a manager so I don't know the official policies around dev lists and PIPs. Generally, new hires are given a few months to ramp up and become contributing team members. People are usually placed on the dev list if they don't meet expectations, and placed on a PIP if their performance does not improve. I'm guessing it reflects poorly on managers if they devlist someone shortly after hiring them. During my time at Amazon, I know only one person who was placed on a PIP and he was kind of a bad engineer. But I have heard stories of managers abusing the dev list to meet org-level dev list quotas.
- julianozen 6y agoNo there isnt. I have only known of one person to get a PIP during my 3 years there, and it took way longer then it should've
- rory_isAdonk 6y agoAh that was my fear, not because I feel like I'm a terrible software engineer and I'd be asking for PIP by joining Amazon. More just because mortgages etc, I'm very anxious money wise.
- julianozen 6y agoYou'll be fine. Amazon didn't become the company it is today by burning out hardworking and talented engineers for no reason. In the scenario I am referring to, the engineer did a very poor job of communication and receiving feedback. When your company is as big as Amazon, you're going to have some people who didn't quite fit. The people who succeeded there don't spend their time talking to journalists or complaining on HN Overall, I spent my time there working with ambitious and smart people. And money-wise, I feel like you can't work at a safer place in the tech industry then at a FAANG company, particularly Amazon.
- rory_isAdonk 6y agoGreat I had aimed for applying for Stripe in August, again my anxiety is consistent I've quite a encompassing study guide I've made for myself. Thanks though man you insight is invaluable.
- gigatexal 6y agoCrazy to think that such a profitable unit like AWS could have teams that are hurting for funding. I guess it’s run like that though.
- ryanianian 6y agoEvery company struggles with 'properly' managing funding and resources.
- julianozen 6y agoI think AWS teams are not generally hurting for funding. You see that more in retail parts of amazon
- cpufry 6y ago> It was like night and day - the team was over-funded and had very few operational issues. oh god which service/team/
- randomanon2020 6y agoI was recently interviewed for AWS, and its a JOKE :), i said i was proficient in Linux and all the questions i was asked was about docker.. and this is just one example out of 100 :)
- julianozen 6y agoI enjoyed my team and the work hours were reasonable. AWS wasn't the type of product work I wanted to keep pursing, but I learned a lot in my time there. Amazon team's culture vary widely depending on the teams budget, management style and deadlines. Overall I enjoyed my time at Amazon
- MikeTheGreat 6y agoSeveral posts here mention the importance of budget/funding for creating a good team to work in (which is 100% reasonable - that's true everywhere). I'm curious about how individual teams within Amazon have funding problems. Amazon overall seems to have plenty of money and they seem like the sort of place that wouldn't have a problem dissolving a team that isn't meeting their goals (I'm assuming they'd dissolve the team and then move people they want to keep to other teams, etc - they seem like they'd be very data driven about what teams to keep, not malicious). Can anyone shed light on how a team might develop funding / budget issues at a place like Amazon?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- julianozen 6y agoFrom my time at Amazon, I wasn't really a part of these decisions so the following is just my anecdotal perception those businesses and how often teams had things like lunches, team events and hired staff In general, if the underlying business is profitable or if the product is experimental Amazon will allocate a larger budget to the team - Retail has narrow profits and is fairly well established -> Lower budgets - AWS is very profitable -> High budget - Alexa (while I was there) was growing very fast and was trying crazy initiatives -> High budget Contrast this to my impression of Google, where it seems like every team has roughly the same perks but only a few make money
- belval 6y agoNot OP and YMMV but I really like my team and the engineering/research challenges we face are interesting. I read the infamous "stay the fk away from Amazon" (https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/3ce0s8/dear_amazon_interns_some_advice_from_an_old_man/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/3ce0s8/dear_amazon...) before I was hired and the author's experience is completely misaligned with mine.
- tixocloud 6y agoThat's a possibility. Another one would be more out of regulatory requirement within financial services. By default, most top tier banks would need multi-cloud to even begin thinking about a cloud journey so this offering just puts AWS in the right space with their competitors. It's possible that most of the operational workloads will run on AWS with other cloud vendors being in place as backup/secondary workloads. Might also be some good discounts given by AWS to secure the deal.
- julianozen 6y agoYeah, once those customers have a set up they can just price them into only using AWS Cloud Deals already signed, thing are already integrated
- _alex_ 6y agoNot true. I used to work at a very large us bank and while multi-region was a thing the regulators cared about, multi-cloud was not.
- martamorena9182 6y agoSee Jeff Bezos' famous comment: "It is better to cannibalize yourself; than let others cannibalize you" This should answer your question and hint what's to come.
- gauravphoenix 6y agoI think it was Steve Jobs https://www.crowdspring.com/blog/if-you-dont-cannibalize-yourself-someone-else-will/ https://www.crowdspring.com/blog/if-you-dont-cannibalize-you...
- totaldude87 6y agoand that is what they did iPhones cannibalized iPods iPads put a dent on Macs
- scarface74 6y agoiPhones cannibalizing iPods is true in theory but misses it in spirit. It’s not a hard argument to make to sell a product that is more profitable and a larger addressable market. The Mac just had its best quarter - ever - before the release of the M1 Macs.
- gnramires 6y agoThe classic case I often heard is Kodak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak#Shift_to_digital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak#Shift_to_digital It was a pioneer in digital transition but moved too slowly in fear of cannibalizing their film business. Ironically, today it seems printing and their legacy film are their strengths (and the consumer digital camera market is dead, shifted to smartphones) -- which seems to complicate drawing lessons. However, it could easily have invested in e.g. sensor manufacturing if it recognized early the potential of the transition and still be well today[1]. I think a good strategy is to fearlessly cannibalize [1] yourself yes, but don't abandon your strengths and expertise, instead use them to propel your new ventures. [1]: I think a good definition of self-cannibalization is due. In this case, it refers to abandoning unstable businesses. For example, trying to hold a market by forcing out "better", newer devices (digital vs film) is unstable -- you're betting on blocking the adoption of a better alternative. [2]: Sony appears to have done well, today the leading camera sensor manufacturer https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201007005124/en/Strategy-Analytics-Sony-Led-the-Growing-Smartphone-Image-Sensor-Market-in-H1-2020 https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201007005124/en/Str...
- NDizzle 6y agoSome times new decision makers join the company and they want to use other cloud providers. That's a valid concern that most people should have as they're building out things specific to one vendor.
- cheesgrateron 6y agoI've worked as a consultant in this area for years with large F500 companies and not once have I heard anyone actually be concerned with the "lock in" boogeyman. There used to be a lot of concern around general trust of the cloud, which drove people to stick to on-prem servers. But "lock in", IME, is only something people fret about on HN. What I think is happening is that companies are starting to gain more experience in the cloud and are less intimidated by it. In the past, using just one cloud was scary enough, let alone trying to use 2+ at the same time. But now, with more experience under their belt, companies are realizing that each cloud has its own advantages and disadvantages. AWS is rock solid when it comes to EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, and some others. But if you have some teams in your company that want to use a PaaS, GCP App Engine is preferable to AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Similarly, your data science or AI/ML teams might prefer to use GCP services over AWS. Or maybe your risk management team is going the full stretch for disaster recovery and says not only do you have to be multi-region within one cloud, but you are required to be multi-cloud as well. With companies moving this way, I think this is AWS realizing that multi-cloud is inevitable, so they might as well support it, if not embrace it.
- dboreham 6y agoAnyone who is not concerned about lock in is a fool. There are many fools in business.
- abraae 6y agoEverything in life is about risk vs reward. Platform lock in is a risk. The reward is faster time to market, thus making more money earlier, thus having more means to ameliorate your risks.
- Nullabillity 6y agoImagined faster time to market. In reality, you just end up spending more time trying to debug black boxes.
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- hodgesrm 6y agoThis looks like Amazon FUD. The revenue from alternate clouds will be tiny compared to running in AWS, so there's not much motivation internally to follow through. Also, to make money on other clouds you have to go deep on the products and offer value adds on top. That's not the Amazon model and anyway would be difficult to implement outside of a small number of products. Ergo, this is not something they are really going to do in a meaningful way. MS SQL Server is a historical analogy. Microsoft could have run the table in the database market by porting to Linux but took years to overcome internal inertia required to run outside Windows.
- totaldude87 6y agowith the ever expanding number of services/industries Amazon is operating at(or planning to get into) , the vendor lock in is becoming the real deal. Ex walmart wont go to aws, just because and it probably never will! So the loss of AWS is gain for Azure(w.r.t Walmart) and frankly apart from the 365 offerings people are taking azure seriously because Azure or Microsoft doesn't compete with other industries on a broader scale! On the flip side, Netflix uses AWS even though amazon competes it with Prime (not sure for how long), as amazon knocking the doors of new industries such as Big pharma, either they need to move AWS as a separate company or ease them with these kind of multi cloud measures.
- daxfohl 6y agoWith anthos and arc, the iaas market is going to be commodity with near zero margin. The writing is on the wall that services will be the more profitable market in the long run. AWS recognizes this and the multi cloud push is the way to maximize on that.
- Loic 6y agoThis the AWS extension of the Marketplace part of Amazon retail. Thanks to this, they will know how companies are running their systems on other clouds, the same way the know what independent vendors are selling and how well. This is going to be very interesting on the long run.
- erikerikson 6y agoMy experience in the three majors approximates market share. There are a lot of differences but AWS is just better (obvs opinion). When organizations are less locked in they have flexibility to choose according to evolving preference and this makes multi-cloud a systemic customer acquisition strategy. Consider multi-cloud an on ramp and I think you look at the basis for the strategy. Consider further that fuzzier cloud boundaries re-enable the innovation pipelines that start ups deliver to the incumbents but that were being complicated by cloud boundaries.
- crb002 6y agoBezos wants you controlling everything from AWS, be that your own servers with GreenGrass or GCP/Azure through managed Kubernetes.