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Anyone who makes the blanket assertion that "AWS is not the best product at anything" is failing to grasp the fundamental advantage of AWS--it is the only (and

Anyone who makes the blanket assertion that "AWS is not the best product at anything" is failing to grasp the fundamental advantage of AWS--it is the only (and therefore best and cheapest) "full line" IAAS provider. Obviously simple value added services like Dropbox that primarily leverage just one piece of the cloud (storage) will eventually move to wherever (and everywhere) that they can get their infrastructure cheapest. When complex services like Netflix begin moving off of AWS is when I'd start worrying.

opendais 12y ago
Eh? What do you consider "full line"? I'm pretty sure Netflix uses it due to the highly variable usage situation. It never makes sense to have a server sitting idle for 23 hours a day.
- opendais 12y ago
  I'm amused by the downvotes combined with the unwillingness to define "full line".
- femto113 12y ago
  I think "full line" isn't an entirely static concept in IAAS, but I'm using it here to suggest there's no other player offering the same breadth of services. I haven't surveyed other providers in detail lately, but I expect for any given competitor it wouldn't take you long to find some AWS service (http://aws.amazon.com/products/ http://aws.amazon.com/products/) that they simply don't have an equivalent for. EDIT: found someone who's made a feature grid here: http://www.planforcloud.com/pages/resources/cloud_services.html http://www.planforcloud.com/pages/resources/cloud_services.h... This doesn't even include more esoteric stuff like Redshift and Elastic Beanstalk.
bellerocky 12y ago
The other thing that AWS has going for it is widely adopted third party support. Pretty much any software, site, tool or service that has any sort of cloud monitoring, deployment etc feature will be integrated with AWS. This not true for any of AWS's competitors. I've never seen a third-party provide support for an AWS competitor before supporting AWS. I know monitoring tools that do not support Azure, Google Cloud or Rackspace. I know libraries that don't support all of them but always support AWS. In addition most sysadmins and developers will be more likely familiar with AWS's tools, API and dashboard. They'll be more likely to already have their development environment set up with AWS command lines tools. You ever heard of someone with HP cloud tools installed [1]? I frequently browse dotfiles on GitHub and often see non-sensitive AWS credentials and aliases. I've never seen a Rackspace or Google Cloud thing in them. AWS wins on mindshare. It's also a proven system. Infrasture decisions are really important, and downtime is very bad and when you choose AWS you know at the very least that if your shit goes down because of provider issues everyone else will be down too and you can kind of get a pass (although outsourcing downtime is kind of shitty), but if you're not on AWS and your shit goes down because of the provider people will ask you why aren't you using AWS. Your customers and investors might actually be unhappy with you because of this. As for support Google also has terrible support, Rackspace's managed support is very expensive and actually probably not what a competent team would want, otherwise it is easy to get a person on the phone at Rackspace, so that is commendable. Support doesn't scale, but if you are paying AWS a lot I bet you can get support. I don't really like the mono-culture of AWS everywhere, but I feel like the points above need to be raised. A standard on APIs like OpenStack would be nice, but implementations will differ and AWS will fight this kind of change and because of their dominance getting traction will be hard. [1] this is actually a thing: https://docs.hpcloud.com/cli https://docs.hpcloud.com/cli

opendais 12y ago

Eh? What do you consider "full line"? I'm pretty sure Netflix uses it due to the highly variable usage situation. It never makes sense to have a server sitting idle for 23 hours a day.

opendais 12y ago
I'm amused by the downvotes combined with the unwillingness to define "full line".
femto113 12y ago
I think "full line" isn't an entirely static concept in IAAS, but I'm using it here to suggest there's no other player offering the same breadth of services. I haven't surveyed other providers in detail lately, but I expect for any given competitor it wouldn't take you long to find some AWS service (http://aws.amazon.com/products/ http://aws.amazon.com/products/) that they simply don't have an equivalent for. EDIT: found someone who's made a feature grid here: http://www.planforcloud.com/pages/resources/cloud_services.html http://www.planforcloud.com/pages/resources/cloud_services.h... This doesn't even include more esoteric stuff like Redshift and Elastic Beanstalk.

bellerocky 12y ago

The other thing that AWS has going for it is widely adopted third party support. Pretty much any software, site, tool or service that has any sort of cloud monitoring, deployment etc feature will be integrated with AWS. This not true for any of AWS's competitors. I've never seen a third-party provide support for an AWS competitor before supporting AWS. I know monitoring tools that do not support Azure, Google Cloud or Rackspace. I know libraries that don't support all of them but always support AWS. In addition most sysadmins and developers will be more likely familiar with AWS's tools, API and dashboard. They'll be more likely to already have their development environment set up with AWS command lines tools. You ever heard of someone with HP cloud tools installed [1]? I frequently browse dotfiles on GitHub and often see non-sensitive AWS credentials and aliases. I've never seen a Rackspace or Google Cloud thing in them. AWS wins on mindshare. It's also a proven system. Infrasture decisions are really important, and downtime is very bad and when you choose AWS you know at the very least that if your shit goes down because of provider issues everyone else will be down too and you can kind of get a pass (although outsourcing downtime is kind of shitty), but if you're not on AWS and your shit goes down because of the provider people will ask you why aren't you using AWS. Your customers and investors might actually be unhappy with you because of this. As for support Google also has terrible support, Rackspace's managed support is very expensive and actually probably not what a competent team would want, otherwise it is easy to get a person on the phone at Rackspace, so that is commendable. Support doesn't scale, but if you are paying AWS a lot I bet you can get support. I don't really like the mono-culture of AWS everywhere, but I feel like the points above need to be raised. A standard on APIs like OpenStack would be nice, but implementations will differ and AWS will fight this kind of change and because of their dominance getting traction will be hard. [1] this is actually a thing: https://docs.hpcloud.com/cli https://docs.hpcloud.com/cli