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I think you may be under the misunderstanding that AWS = EC2/S3. It isn't. AWS also includes SQS, IAM, SWF, SimpleDB, DynamoDB etc all of which are proprietary

I think you may be under the misunderstanding that AWS = EC2/S3. It isn't. AWS also includes SQS, IAM, SWF, SimpleDB, DynamoDB etc all of which are proprietary with very Amazon specific APIs. As each new developer starts to use these it "locks" them into the platform as a whole. And since many of these are core services I just don't see customers moving to a competitor unless there is a massive difference in price/features. Also don't forget: NOBODY offers the complete range of unified services that AWS does right now AFAIK.

ajross 14y ago
No, AWS == EC2/EBS/S3. Period. That's where the money is. Yes, Amazon offers that other stuff. I'm sure someone buys it. I refuse to believe it's a significant fraction of AWS revenue without evidence. Huge numbers of successful sites are built on the core stuff. Are any large sites using the Amazon lock-in features? I'm certainly not aware of any.
- taligent 14y ago
  I agree that EC2/S3 is where Amazon makes its money and I doubt any large site is using the other features. The services are new and are specialized in nature. But people ARE starting to look at them and it is an area (PaaS) that is going to become more and more compelling for businesses in the future. And Amazon is right now is the only player I know of in that space. And every new user they attract could well be locked in for life.
  - ajross 14y ago
    But I think you're missing the point. Google App Engine (and Heroku for that matter) is a PaaS product. They were there first, and they lost to the commodity metaphor. You can argue that Amazon will succeed based on the quality of their offering, I guess, but not simply because it's "PaaS". The market has spoken, they don't like that.
    - nl 14y ago
      PaaS hasn't lost - it's just a smaller market than IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), and it will take longer to become mature. IaaS is immediately useful to anyone who needs a Linux box. PaaS needs longer lead times for people to adapt to a new platform. Amazon's approach to the PaaS market is probably a lot better than Google's. Google went: here's a new set of APIs, write custom apps to use them. Amazon let you host standard LAMP apps, and then slowly started offering parts of the stack as a service (oh, you need a database? Here, use our managed one. You need search? We have that. Load balancing? Just use ours, it's easier than doing it yourself.)
shykes 14y ago
Except when you say "AWS has cornered the market", you actually mean "EC2 and S3 have cornered the cloud VM and blob storage markets". Every other AWS service has a ways to go before it can claim to have cornered anything.
- taligent 14y ago
  No. I think of AWS now as a PaaS and whilst it is a tiny market it is a growth one and Amazon is the big fish. There are lots of companies offering database/search engine/queues as a service but none that offer all of them integrated under a unified security model.
  - shykes 14y ago
    Before I believe your "big fish" theory you'll have to show me numbers or some sort of convincing anecdotical evidence. Every day I see overwhelming evidence from my work that EC2 and S3 are widely adopted in the tech startup community. RDS is a very, very, very distant third. Everything else (beanstalk, elasticache, elastic map reduce...) is not even a blip on my radar.
    - nl 14y ago
      I think elastic load balancing is widely adopted.
      - rdl 14y ago
        I don't think ELB is the kind of thing you'd want to use if you weren't on AWS. It's only because they don't do better load balancing or let you build your own (with multiple IPs per box) that you use ELB. Same with DynamoDB: the only reason I'd use it is because EC2 instances don't come with SSDs. Otherwise, meh.

ajross 14y ago

No, AWS == EC2/EBS/S3. Period. That's where the money is. Yes, Amazon offers that other stuff. I'm sure someone buys it. I refuse to believe it's a significant fraction of AWS revenue without evidence. Huge numbers of successful sites are built on the core stuff. Are any large sites using the Amazon lock-in features? I'm certainly not aware of any.

taligent 14y ago
I agree that EC2/S3 is where Amazon makes its money and I doubt any large site is using the other features. The services are new and are specialized in nature. But people ARE starting to look at them and it is an area (PaaS) that is going to become more and more compelling for businesses in the future. And Amazon is right now is the only player I know of in that space. And every new user they attract could well be locked in for life.
- ajross 14y ago
  But I think you're missing the point. Google App Engine (and Heroku for that matter) is a PaaS product. They were there first, and they lost to the commodity metaphor. You can argue that Amazon will succeed based on the quality of their offering, I guess, but not simply because it's "PaaS". The market has spoken, they don't like that.
  - nl 14y ago
    PaaS hasn't lost - it's just a smaller market than IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), and it will take longer to become mature. IaaS is immediately useful to anyone who needs a Linux box. PaaS needs longer lead times for people to adapt to a new platform. Amazon's approach to the PaaS market is probably a lot better than Google's. Google went: here's a new set of APIs, write custom apps to use them. Amazon let you host standard LAMP apps, and then slowly started offering parts of the stack as a service (oh, you need a database? Here, use our managed one. You need search? We have that. Load balancing? Just use ours, it's easier than doing it yourself.)

shykes 14y ago

Except when you say "AWS has cornered the market", you actually mean "EC2 and S3 have cornered the cloud VM and blob storage markets". Every other AWS service has a ways to go before it can claim to have cornered anything.

taligent 14y ago
No. I think of AWS now as a PaaS and whilst it is a tiny market it is a growth one and Amazon is the big fish. There are lots of companies offering database/search engine/queues as a service but none that offer all of them integrated under a unified security model.
- shykes 14y ago
  Before I believe your "big fish" theory you'll have to show me numbers or some sort of convincing anecdotical evidence. Every day I see overwhelming evidence from my work that EC2 and S3 are widely adopted in the tech startup community. RDS is a very, very, very distant third. Everything else (beanstalk, elasticache, elastic map reduce...) is not even a blip on my radar.
  - nl 14y ago
    I think elastic load balancing is widely adopted.
    - rdl 14y ago
      I don't think ELB is the kind of thing you'd want to use if you weren't on AWS. It's only because they don't do better load balancing or let you build your own (with multiple IPs per box) that you use ELB. Same with DynamoDB: the only reason I'd use it is because EC2 instances don't come with SSDs. Otherwise, meh.