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I have no idea what the OP is talking about. As far as I can understand, the author is saying Amazon (yes, Amazon) is not hard-nosed enough to win a fight with

by blowski 12y ago

I have no idea what the OP is talking about. As far as I can understand, the author is saying Amazon (yes, Amazon) is not hard-nosed enough to win a fight with Google and Microsoft. #1 - "AWS is not the low price provider", "Being low priced is in Amazon’s nature so this will be intensely challenging to them". This is true, but as the market-leader, do they need to be? #2 - "most of their features are mediocre knock offs of other products". As @ToddMathews said here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8104364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8104364), he doesn't list any examples of these superior cloud services. I can't think of any. Sure, ELB is a knock off of HAProxy, but in that sense, Gmail is a knockoff of Postfix. #3 - "AWS is unbelievably lousy at support", "Support is just not in Amazon’s nature". Really? Compared to whom? In my experience, they have always been one of the best providers of support of any online company. #4 - "Once you are at $200k / month of spend, it’s cheaper and much more effective to build your own infrastructure". And yet many businesses spend more than $200k PCM. Are they stupid? Or is the author wrong?

Semaphor 12y ago
Especially #3. Amazon is willing to let themselves be scammed before denying free replacement products to customers.
- opendais 12y ago
  That isn't true. I've had to issue chargebacks when Amazon's vendor and Amazon couldn't come to an understanding and I never received the software product w/o a revoked key.
  - Semaphor 12y ago
    Might also be country dependent. I'm using amazon.de (besides .com for prime instant) and Germany is known for it's strong consumer protection laws so Amazon might have beefed up their service here. But I've read some articles before from US customers having amazing experiences. edit: Sorry, didn't see "vendor" before. True, when you are using marketplace you seem to be pretty much on your own.
    - opendais 12y ago
      Ah, but it was Amazon selling the product, not the vendor. The vendor claims Amazon revoked the keys so when you try to activate the product it was unusable without using a crack.
- x0x0 12y ago
  I've had very good customer service purchasing physical items from amazon. ec2 and associated services' customer service and support has been pretty shitty, and these are from companies paying anywhere from $8k to $96k/mo
  - blowski 12y ago
    I agree that their AWS support needs a lot of improvement, and there are others in the industry (rackspace, peer one) who are better. But I disagree with the OP's assertion that Amazon is inherently incapable of providing good customer service in any of its markets.
    - Semaphor 12y ago
      That was exactly my point :)
d23 12y ago
#2 always was what impressed me most about AWS. When I was trying out Digital Ocean, I had to hack together my own scripts to set up the equivalent of cloudfront, auto-scaling, and elastic load balancing. I realized just how important those seemingly small infrastructure tools are when they "just work".
- blowski 12y ago
  Exactly. The value of AWS is not in the individual pieces, but in how all the pieces fit together, and how a novice is able to do it.
seanflyon 12y ago
Regarding #4, do you know how common it is to spend over $200k per month. If it is a rare use case I would not be surprised if those companies are making a sub-optimal decision. In my anecdotal experience, whenever we considered that order of magnitude of spend on AWS we ended up building our own infrastructure.

by blowski 12y ago

Semaphor 12y ago

Especially #3. Amazon is willing to let themselves be scammed before denying free replacement products to customers.

opendais 12y ago
That isn't true. I've had to issue chargebacks when Amazon's vendor and Amazon couldn't come to an understanding and I never received the software product w/o a revoked key.
- Semaphor 12y ago
  Might also be country dependent. I'm using amazon.de (besides .com for prime instant) and Germany is known for it's strong consumer protection laws so Amazon might have beefed up their service here. But I've read some articles before from US customers having amazing experiences. edit: Sorry, didn't see "vendor" before. True, when you are using marketplace you seem to be pretty much on your own.
  - opendais 12y ago
    Ah, but it was Amazon selling the product, not the vendor. The vendor claims Amazon revoked the keys so when you try to activate the product it was unusable without using a crack.
x0x0 12y ago
I've had very good customer service purchasing physical items from amazon. ec2 and associated services' customer service and support has been pretty shitty, and these are from companies paying anywhere from $8k to $96k/mo
- blowski 12y ago
  I agree that their AWS support needs a lot of improvement, and there are others in the industry (rackspace, peer one) who are better. But I disagree with the OP's assertion that Amazon is inherently incapable of providing good customer service in any of its markets.
  - Semaphor 12y ago
    That was exactly my point :)

d23 12y ago

#2 always was what impressed me most about AWS. When I was trying out Digital Ocean, I had to hack together my own scripts to set up the equivalent of cloudfront, auto-scaling, and elastic load balancing. I realized just how important those seemingly small infrastructure tools are when they "just work".

blowski 12y ago
Exactly. The value of AWS is not in the individual pieces, but in how all the pieces fit together, and how a novice is able to do it.

seanflyon 12y ago

Regarding #4, do you know how common it is to spend over $200k per month. If it is a rare use case I would not be surprised if those companies are making a sub-optimal decision. In my anecdotal experience, whenever we considered that order of magnitude of spend on AWS we ended up building our own infrastructure.