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This is likely only true until they have enough lock-in on those cloud products to really turn the screws and extract maximum profits from people that are TOTAL

This is likely only true until they have enough lock-in on those cloud products to really turn the screws and extract maximum profits from people that are TOTALLY screwed by being completely locked into proprietary AWS services... This is basically the natural progression of SaaS...

blackoil 4y ago
This is often mentioned scenario but highly unlikely as impractical it is. First, AWS is already highly profitable, they aren't dumping where this step becomes a necessity. Also, any such move would dry up future growth from adding new customers, which is suicidal.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  Is AWS profitable enough though?
dehrmann 4y ago
Existing customers will flee as quickly as they can, and new customers will look elsewhere. In reality, they'll never charge more than their public rate card, and that rate card has to be competitive with the competition.
pwinnski 4y ago
You think AWS doesn't have enough lock-in now? And yet maximum profits come from keeping customers, not driving them away. There's no such thing as a managed service so proprietary that it can't be essentially cloned by another provider. I remember people making the same claims about S3 long ago, and yet there are multiple providers of S3-compatible file storage services now. Microsoft's Azure provides migration tools for people wanting to leave Amazon's AWS, and they are not alone. Amazon tends to be (in my opinion) a few years ahead of everybody else, and different competitors focus on different areas of competition, but migrating away from AWS isn't really as hard as the "proprietary" label might make it seem.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  Our organization moved from AWS to GCP. We were very integrated in AWS, but the migration wasn’t so bad, and even with the benefit of hindsight I would never have thought that we should have strived to be cloud agnostic. Or rather, the best way to be “cloud agnostic” is to architect your applications sensibly such that changing from S3 to GCS is a relatively small, localized change in each application. Also, having a good test suite really helps to protect against regressions, and a culture of documentation will help to make sure you know what things to port over and what things are vestiges of some old requirements and so on. Ultimately, moving cloud providers wasn’t that bad in my experience.

blackoil 4y ago

This is often mentioned scenario but highly unlikely as impractical it is. First, AWS is already highly profitable, they aren't dumping where this step becomes a necessity. Also, any such move would dry up future growth from adding new customers, which is suicidal.

hotpotamus 4y ago
Is AWS profitable enough though?

dehrmann 4y ago

Existing customers will flee as quickly as they can, and new customers will look elsewhere. In reality, they'll never charge more than their public rate card, and that rate card has to be competitive with the competition.

pwinnski 4y ago

You think AWS doesn't have enough lock-in now? And yet maximum profits come from keeping customers, not driving them away. There's no such thing as a managed service so proprietary that it can't be essentially cloned by another provider. I remember people making the same claims about S3 long ago, and yet there are multiple providers of S3-compatible file storage services now. Microsoft's Azure provides migration tools for people wanting to leave Amazon's AWS, and they are not alone. Amazon tends to be (in my opinion) a few years ahead of everybody else, and different competitors focus on different areas of competition, but migrating away from AWS isn't really as hard as the "proprietary" label might make it seem.

throwaway894345 4y ago
Our organization moved from AWS to GCP. We were very integrated in AWS, but the migration wasn’t so bad, and even with the benefit of hindsight I would never have thought that we should have strived to be cloud agnostic. Or rather, the best way to be “cloud agnostic” is to architect your applications sensibly such that changing from S3 to GCS is a relatively small, localized change in each application. Also, having a good test suite really helps to protect against regressions, and a culture of documentation will help to make sure you know what things to port over and what things are vestiges of some old requirements and so on. Ultimately, moving cloud providers wasn’t that bad in my experience.