> Apparently the whole bid process is now on hold, not because of anything AWS did wrong, but because, well, Jeff Bezos also owns the Washington Post, which Donald Trump does not appreciate, and so it’s all a mess.
This isn't even Amazon's problem, I'm not sure what anyone is meant to do about the President of the USA being a petulant child, other than just take their lumps.
Whole article is a bit odd tbh, doesn't seem like AWS is really struggling.
Yes, if AWS is losing out because a politician doesn't like the founder that's a failure of your country's democratic process and defies everything the US purports to stand for. Sure, spinning AWS might be the prudent thing to do from shareholder's point of view in the short term. But doing so, makes things extraordinarily hard for the very same shareholders in the medium to long term.
Of course everyone wants the government involved until it affects their company.
More government involvement is seldom the right answer. It amazes me that even after we all witnessed the clusterf%%% of California trying to force Uber to treat drivers as employees — making it harder for people who wanted to be freelancers — that people still trust the competency of government.
Weird how you can consider this a "clusterf%%%" as opposed to the existance of Uber itself: an unprofitable company that only barters for monopoly power while treating everyone down the chain like shit.
Not that I'm behind splitting up companies. Everything that turns into a monopoly should be nationalized instead.
Nationalizing monopolies? So instead of them eventually being replaced by the market, they are forever entombed by public unions, pork, and politicians where they'd go on like rotten zombies forever? That is a horrible idea.
Temporary nationalization is a thing. Nationalize the monopoly firm, spin off the portions that are not inherently monopolistic and can be entrusted to the private sector, and run the rest - the "platform" part, where barriers to entry are inherently high and there's thus a lot of monopoly risk - as a public utility. You basically lose out on some potential for vertical integration, but the flip side is that the enterprise neatly escapes the fate of being "forever entombed by public unions, pork, and politicians where they'd go on like rotten zombies forever".
How is being unprofitable different than every VC backed company - including ones backed by YC?
Even Dropbox - one of only two YC backed companies to go public - isn’t profitable and has said repeatedly they have no idea when they will be profitable. I don’t know anything about PagerDuty.
And what happens as soon as the other party wants to implement policy you don't like?
> Everything that turns into a monopoly should be nationalized instead.
I don't think it even needs to be a monopoly there are services that makes no sense to have companies competing to provide them.
Most utilities fall under this
Don't get me started on water in the UK.
It's private and you get no choice of supplier, how this is not a national scandal i don't know. At least with Gas/Electricity/Broadband (Excluding virgin from this) at least there is competition if delivered through the same means.
More controversially, post/parcel delivery could likely benefit from being a single company IF run properly, big if, I know.
More controversially, post/parcel delivery could likely benefit from being a single company IF run properly, big if, I know.
Seeing that all of the problems with the US postal service are caused by government interference, that isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.
The postal service wanted to cut delivery days to save money - but Congress wouldn't let it. Congress also forced the USPS to fund retirement pensions in excess of any private or government organization.
>More government involvement is seldom the right answer.
Actually most of the times, more government regulation is the right answer. There's a long history where limited government involvement and corresponding lack of regulations have impacted citizens (remember AT&T and phone rentals?)
The problem with regulations now is how the process has been subverted by capitalism to provide a benefit to one (or a small number of) business(es) which does not provide a level playing field.
I don't know how we would solve this problem, because of the nature of capitalism where the corporation with the deepest pockets wins.
It was because of the government that AT&T had phone rentals. The government gave AT&T a monopoly and made it illegal to connect your own device to the phone line.
Unregulated monopolies have drawbacks, but so do government-regulated ones. (It's OK, I'll understand if you can't reply right away if you're on PG&E power.)
> More government involvement is seldom the right answer
Are there workable solutions to negative externalities other than government involvement?
Obviously, regulation doesn't always work perfectly, but until some other way of handling negative externalities is discovered, it seems we should focus on improving how regulation is done those cases.
There are other arguments for government, but I find this to be the simplest and most compelling.
Are there workable solutions to negative externalities other than government involvement?
When it comes to tech, "negative externalities" usually equals "a company is doing something I don't like" not "a company is killing people or harming the environment".
The main reason for my reply was that it seemed like your comment was making broad statements about government, such as implying that government is incapable of competently tackling any problem.
I responded in kind with a broad statement as I felt that was a harmful sweeping generalization that ignored fundamental dynamics such as negative externalities, and needed to be challenged.
Microsoft didn't spend enough money on lobbying in the 90s, and so the government cracked down on them. "Nice browser you have there, shame if something happened to it."
Also the 90s were arguably the last time there was an anti-trust friendly majority in the US Supreme Court and various US attorneys general willing to try such a case. The Republican Party has put a lot of effort into removing trust busters from the Supreme Court and state attorneys general since the 90s.
Donald Trump doesn't like the Washington Post so it lost a contract and protestors interrupted a talk about AWS facial recognition.
How will this be solved by spinning it off? The first is that he thinks a different CEO would be better and the second isn't going to change because AWS is a huge cloud company and people aren't stupid that they won't realise the name has changed.
And it's known as Amazon Web services even if they rebranded to just AWS.
It would be a stupid move to change such a strong brand name to something else.
I actually think the OP is right, but not for the example they listed and not in a way that I directly care about or that impacts me (but would be better for Amazon).
The fact that Amazon is also a retail shopping site / now owns whole foods causes a lot of high end/large retail giants to NOT use AWS and actively have in their contracts that they will not do business with a company if AWS is their cloud provider.
There are exceptions, like if you stand up infrastructure specifically for the retail client that's against using AWS in another cloud instance (And I'm sure there are other exceptions out there).
But this is something that negatively impacts Amazon / AWS. I think ultimately though that's a business decision that they are welcome to make for themselves and I don't think really impacts the end AWS user.
But is Netflix an example of a company that's happy to be paying Amazon whatever they're paying them? I don't know the exact chronology, but I think Netflix pre-dates Amazon being in the Media business much, if at all?
Netflix also don't really have an option, outside of building their own cloud, since Microsoft and Google also have video streaming. It's a little different if you're a Sears or Walmart, and you're not directly competing with the other providers.
Same with Apple and Samsung. Sometimes you're stuck buying from competition because they're the only people making the thing you need. It doesn't mean you're happy about it or wouldn't jump ship if possible.
Sure, but that doesn't really change the point. If you decide that cloud is where you have to go, Netflix doesn't have an option that's not competing with them, really. Doesn't mean they love bankrolling Amazon.
Yeah, I'm not saying that there aren't exceptions. But if you want to do business with Walmart or Target, unless you're a major player, you can expect them to have a requirement of not using AWS.
Just noting what I've seen from projects that I've actively worked on first hand.
(Also Walmart and Target are far from the only ones that do this, just using them as examples.)
I think the buried and more convincing point in there is that Bezos and Amazon's continued expansion into new markets mean there's more and more industries that feel threatened by Amazon, and thus more worried about funneling them money through AWS.
If you're building out a new company right now and get to pick your cloud provider, how confident are you that in 5 years, Amazon won't be selling a competing product to yours? And if you're starting from nothing, why not just use GCP or Azure and avoid that risk?
Google and esp MS are more limited in the imitation copy strategy risks. If you’ve got something compelling that they want, most likely they’ll buy you out. Amazon occasionally buys companies out too, but are also more likely to encroach on your turf. MS and Google tend to build (cooperative) “ecosystems”, Amazon less so.
The folks talking about the JEDI/WaPo issues are missing the bigger concern, which is other retailers pushing down to their SaaS partners a hard message to get off of AWS. I've heard of multiple contracts that came with a clause of "If you're on AWS, we will only renew this if you're off in 2 years". That's a real problem for AWS, especially when Google and Azure are starting to really push into the space more, and AWS's legacy code/patterns/UX are starting to show their age a bit more.
It's not the SaaS partner caring, it's Kroger going "We'll buy your SaaS product, but you better be off AWS in 2 years or we go somewhere else". I've heard first-hand of multiple contracts like this.
Here's a for-instance: Walmart cares because they don't want to give money to Amazon. They also don't trust everyone at AWS to keep their hands off Walmart's data if its stored in AWS.
Now, we can argue encryption and principles of least access until we're blue in the face, but when it comes down to it, Walmart execs simply don't want their data on AWS if there are alternatives. And ultimately, that's all that matters.
There are reasonable concerns about AWS from non-retail too. AWS is using proprietary cloud services to lock in customers. Future increases in AWS's prices will be passed down to the end users.
I don't see it as so much AWS/Google Cloud/Azure is bad, but, did you build something which is impossible to decouple from. That is an upstream cost risk. If a customer can seamlessly move between their own datacenters, AWS, Google, Azure, and so on, that is a good thing.
> AWS is using proprietary cloud services to lock in customers. Future increases in AWS's prices will be passed down to the end users.
That is true of every cloud, certainly of Azure and GCP.
Building a "cloud independent" infrastructure is certainly possible, but it puts you at a huge disadvantage - you can't take advantage of any of the value-added services of the cloud provider.
Google's Kubernetes strategy means that this is currently not quite true of Google. Google must have decided that they were better off getting a large share of a smaller pie by creating an open sourcing Kubernetes. This seems quite likely to me: if Kubernetes "wins" then the profit margins will shrink due to competition but Google will be in a good position to become the premier Kubernetes hosting provider. And if Kubernetes wins, it'll be much harder for Google to lock in customers. For now and the foreseeable future both our and Google's incentives are aligned vis-a-vis open source Kubernetes. If K8S wins divergence will probably happen, but until then we'll enjoy the benefits.
This is no different from AWS, which fully supports Kubernetes (e.g. EKS). You can just as easily do a Kube deployment on either AWS or GCP that makes no use of cloud-specific services, but just like AWS, GCP has a ton of great services that are extremely useful but will tie you in to GCP.
Kubernetes absolutely does not mean no lock-in. The lock-in is just quieter (people will eventually realize this).
Use higher-level services (or even long-tail features of low-level services) that are differentiated between cloud providers from k8s, you are locked in.
Make k8s auth work cleanly with cloud auth, you're locked in.
Rely on a cloud provider service to manage master and/or worker nodes, you're locked in.
You can avoid lock-in by manually running a k8s cluster while using only the lowest-level services that every cloud providers offers (VM, block store, NFS, load balancer, maybe one or two others), but most people don't actually want to do this.
The point is that Google is currently actively working towards reducing lock-in. Storage is one area where I've seen some good movement. Microsoft is also contributing a lot of good stuff to make Kubernetes migration easier.
We'll never get to zero, and I'm sure that Google & Microsoft will eventually put more emphasis on complementary products that increase lock-in. But right now it's trending in the right direction.
I don't agree at all. The current trend is for cloud providers to create k8s operators as a way to lock you in by using cloud services in the background. The Spark Operator for Kubernetes is one example of this that was created by Google. It seems like all the major clouds are doing it (I don't actually have an Azure example, but I imagine you could find some).
> There are reasonable concerns about AWS from non-retail too.
Also, Amazon's "everything store" mentality pushes it up against industries that have never considered themselves retail before, expanding the definition of "retail" to the breaking point in some cases. A lot of companies have been surprised when Amazon expanded into an area they didn't expect, and given time a lot more companies might because there hasn't yet seemed to be a stop to Amazon's "everything store" expansion.
You don't have to look at specific data. You could glean a lot simply from the fluctuation of the aws bill of a competitor. Oh look, the AWS usage went down by 10% after we launched 1 day shipping. Or look, some competitor's Black Friday usage didn't spike as much as it did last year, etc.
That sounds silly considering Walmart ships some "prime free shipping" stuff. In particular when I order some poster frames, it comes from FedEx ground in a Walmart branded shipping box.
While I'm not sure how big a force this will be, it's definitely an issue for SaaS products targetting enterprise customers. I've seen this come up first hand. Hard to know how big an effect it will be though.
This trend is not just in retailers. I have clients asking us who _our_ vendors are, and if _they_ are on AWS, and trying to push us to vendors not using AWS.
Because Amazon uses the profits from AWS to keep running their retail business at a loss and suffocate all competition in that space. It's not hard to understand why retail companies don't want to spend cash on their own destruction.
Asking someone to move platforms over the course of 2 years as a contractual agreement is not the same as having someone breach an already-existing contract with AWS.
I get the concern, but Amazon is very aware that they can't do anything non-competitive with AWS to help its other business. Netflix (who undoubtedly has a long-term contract) still hosts there.
The home field advantages companies have been getting away with lately tend to be tighter integrations (think Chromecast, Android, and Chrome). The only company that would pull something as bad as what's being feared is Oracle.
The "non-competitive" thing they're doing with AWS is using it as a profit center so they can do anti-competitive things with all of their other businesses. If they weren't making so much money on AWS, they wouldn't be able to squeeze Netflix or other retailers as effectively.
It's not to say it's entirely rational to boycott AWS like this, but I can understand the origin of it, and it's not like you can easily say no to a Walmart if you're some SaaS startup and they're offering you a massive contract if you can get off of AWS.
Amazon has made it their business to clone 10,000s of items and software's just as easy to copy, they have already cloned multiple open source products and even commercial stuff they saw hosted on AWS.
The only thing stopping them from routinely cloning stuff they see on AWS is nothing. They are accused of using vendor sales data to decide which products to clone, well that front-row seat watching you scale infers revenue too. Whenever Bezos wants Amazon will assign thousands of developers to cherry-picking SaaS and software to clone.
They were able to clone it because copying is easier than having the idea and building something for the first time and verifying that anyone wants it. Hosting is analogous to the sales data, it helps prioritize who you should clone first.
Actually it's much simpler. The Walmart's and Kroger's of the world know Amazon makes most of its profit in AWS. Amazon uses the profit to compete on prices with the retailers. So by insisting on working with vendors and partners who don't use AWS, they are trying to reduce the potential profit Amazon could make
Actually the entire concern is irrelevant long term. No way places like Target and Walmart continue to outsource critical SaaS services to contractors. Retail is turning into a SaaS game, and Walmart and Target don't strike me as the kind of organizations that would be caught flat footed by that change.
The reality is, in 2 years, there's a non-trivial likelihood that organizations like that may not be giving out those kinds of contracts at all. Too critical. Too much value add going forward. To own that infrastructure will confer too much competitive advantage for, say, Target to allow Walmart to build that out unchallenged. If you're in the business of serving large retailers services like this, you should probably be wargaming out some possible pivots before the market for those services begins to shrink.
But there's a silver lining to those changes for everyone else, it's entirely possible that these retailers may go into providing those services that are going to start being on the critical path so to speak. Think Walmart and Target building out AWS competitors, or package delivery services, etc etc.
I disagree about Walmart possibly being caught flat footed. While it's valid to point out that Walmart Labs exists Wich means Walmart has a finger in the data science and ML pie, Walmart got caught off guard with online sales, to the point that they are credible competition to Amazon Prime - better in some areas, worse in others - this fact is barely known, with most of my friends (which is hardly the most scientific data set) happy customers of Amazon Prime. If Walmart was caught so flat-footed, and so unknown in this area, arguably central to the future of their business, it's hard to see them as a credible threat to Amazon.com or AWS, and not for lack of trying re: Amazon.com.
I don't think Walmart was actually caught off guard with online retail. But because they had (and still have) such a massive retail market share, the powers that be inside Walmart undoubtedly stifled innovation in order to avoid cannibalizing their retail arm. (The Innovators Dillema).
But wmt seems to have mostly woken up and correctly organized their power structure to empower the e-commerce arm. They even brought in an outsider (founder of jet.com).
Oh please... more of this JEDI/WaPo stuff? It ignores that the NSA (and by extension, the DOD) have a long relationship with Microsoft just as the CIA have a long relationship with Amazon and have "AWS-lite" installed at Langley. Microsoft has been very accommodating to the DOD, agreeing to continue maintenance on Windows XP for as long as the Navy continues to request (and pay for) it. Yes, Trump has his gripes with WaPo and might have suggested to Mattis to screw AWS, but it's very likely that the Five Sided Puzzle Palace wanted to go with Azure Stack all along but had to do the open competition thing to avoid being sued by companies not named Microsoft.
Yeah, its pretty crazy how the narrative has become "Trump is insane, AWS was going to win it until he stepped in." AWS fought very well, but Microsoft was destined to win no matter what they did, as long as they could check every box (or make promises that they will check them soon).
You're hiring a new software engineer. You've got one candidate who's a bonafide genius, but young and can't communicate very well. You've got another candidate who seems to be within 80% of the skill level of the former, but came recommended by a trusted third party and can clearly communicate with the team. Which do you pick?
The argument sounds confused. People are not "confused" to protest about amazon in AWS conference, they are one. Companies trust AWS exactly because it's backed by the world's richest and apparently capable and trustworthy CEO. Them losing business because of that is just ... normal market functioning? There's no god-given right to AWS to dominate the market. Let the best ones overall, win.
I think the argument is that AWS would be a better player in the market if it wasn't directly owned by Amazon. They still get the benefit of having been built by all the money of Amazon, and they could still be owned by Bezos as a separate company, but they wouldn't be paying money into the co-mingled account/balance sheet with Amazon.
> and they could still be owned by Bezos as a separate company
But that's their whole 'competitive disadvantage'. WaPo and amazon are already separate. The fact that AWS would be separate on paper has very little gravity also.
AWS runs ICE servers, and ICE uses AWS Rekognition as part of their crackdowns[1]. I was at the AWS NYC Keynote this year, and the protesters were very clear: "Cut ties with ICE!" Maybe AWS only has ICE contracts because of Amazon, but that seems unlikely. AWS pushes GovCloud hard, and therefore is going to make deals with US Government entities, and lots of those entities are extremely unpopular. I'm currently moving my personal tech off of AWS, and while it'll be a longer haul, I'll be doing the same for my workplace as I'm able to.
I agree it's a somewhat moot point, which didn't really click with me, either, as the argument assumes that these anti-ICE protests are carried out by non-engineers, which given the latest Chef and GitHub stories, isn't necessarily the case at all.
Also, even in case of a spin-off, I don't really understand why would Jeff Bezos get out of the picture, either — wouldn't he remain the primary shareholder?
Pretty much all of the arguments in the whole article are both invalid and unsound.
> I agree it's a somewhat moot point, which didn't really click with me, either, as the argument assumes that these anti-ICE protests are carried out by non-engineers, which given the latest Chef and GitHub stories, isn't necessarily the case at all.
The protesters stood up one at a time during the keynote, yelled "Cut ties with ICE", and were escorted out. Then a couple minutes later the next one would start. I don't know whether they were engineers or not, but there was quite a bit of awkward clapping for them, and it cast a shadow over the rest of the event. I spent about half the event googling for what they were talking about, then for AWS alternatives to what I'm using and making plans, and I doubt I was the only one. It was extremely effective.
Not sure I get the logic here. A spun-off AWS and Amazon's interests would naturally diverge over time. What's to stop a situation where AWS become another Oracle that Amazon seek to replace with their own self-built alternative? Couldn't (and why wouldn't) Amazon just start rebuilding AWS afresh?
Even if AWS was spunoff, surely it would still be owned by Bezos just as much? I assume in spin off proportional ownership by shareholders remains the same. I also don't see why their policies vis a vis government would be any different if they were a separate company. So, the argument comes down to people not being smart enough to realize AWS isn't any different as a separate company.
> So with few exceptions, they are hedging their bets. They build on containers in a misplaced belief that will make quick migrations easier, they architect dubious “multi-cloud” workloads … the point is, they’re not using AWS the way it’s designed to be used, as a holistic, deeply integrated platform, and the looming shadow of Amazon is the reason why.
And why is this bad, exactly?
The fewer orgs use and depend exclusively on AWS, the better we'll all be as an industry.
The whole idea that we'd take years of FLOSS work and stuck it into the black-box cloud which we can't control, is pretty absurd if you think about it.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 100 ms ] threadThis isn't even Amazon's problem, I'm not sure what anyone is meant to do about the President of the USA being a petulant child, other than just take their lumps.
Whole article is a bit odd tbh, doesn't seem like AWS is really struggling.
More government involvement is seldom the right answer. It amazes me that even after we all witnessed the clusterf%%% of California trying to force Uber to treat drivers as employees — making it harder for people who wanted to be freelancers — that people still trust the competency of government.
Not that I'm behind splitting up companies. Everything that turns into a monopoly should be nationalized instead.
Even Dropbox - one of only two YC backed companies to go public - isn’t profitable and has said repeatedly they have no idea when they will be profitable. I don’t know anything about PagerDuty.
And what happens as soon as the other party wants to implement policy you don't like?
I don't think it even needs to be a monopoly there are services that makes no sense to have companies competing to provide them.
Most utilities fall under this
Don't get me started on water in the UK.
It's private and you get no choice of supplier, how this is not a national scandal i don't know. At least with Gas/Electricity/Broadband (Excluding virgin from this) at least there is competition if delivered through the same means.
More controversially, post/parcel delivery could likely benefit from being a single company IF run properly, big if, I know.
Seeing that all of the problems with the US postal service are caused by government interference, that isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.
The postal service wanted to cut delivery days to save money - but Congress wouldn't let it. Congress also forced the USPS to fund retirement pensions in excess of any private or government organization.
Actually most of the times, more government regulation is the right answer. There's a long history where limited government involvement and corresponding lack of regulations have impacted citizens (remember AT&T and phone rentals?)
The problem with regulations now is how the process has been subverted by capitalism to provide a benefit to one (or a small number of) business(es) which does not provide a level playing field.
I don't know how we would solve this problem, because of the nature of capitalism where the corporation with the deepest pockets wins.
Centralization of resources is the real enemy.
> More government involvement is seldom the right answer
Are there workable solutions to negative externalities other than government involvement?
Obviously, regulation doesn't always work perfectly, but until some other way of handling negative externalities is discovered, it seems we should focus on improving how regulation is done those cases.
There are other arguments for government, but I find this to be the simplest and most compelling.
When it comes to tech, "negative externalities" usually equals "a company is doing something I don't like" not "a company is killing people or harming the environment".
I responded in kind with a broad statement as I felt that was a harmful sweeping generalization that ignored fundamental dynamics such as negative externalities, and needed to be challenged.
Edit: Sorry for the repeated edits.
They split off IE from Windows, but never used the same criteria for Google and Chrome, Google and Android and the like.
Google learned from MS's mistakes.
Search terms: Google Yandex Android settlement
https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/17/google-reaches-7-8-million...
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google+settlement+russia
All the 4 posting didn't pass a score of 10 here on HN.
Donald Trump doesn't like the Washington Post so it lost a contract and protestors interrupted a talk about AWS facial recognition.
How will this be solved by spinning it off? The first is that he thinks a different CEO would be better and the second isn't going to change because AWS is a huge cloud company and people aren't stupid that they won't realise the name has changed.
And it's known as Amazon Web services even if they rebranded to just AWS.
It would be a stupid move to change such a strong brand name to something else.
The fact that Amazon is also a retail shopping site / now owns whole foods causes a lot of high end/large retail giants to NOT use AWS and actively have in their contracts that they will not do business with a company if AWS is their cloud provider.
There are exceptions, like if you stand up infrastructure specifically for the retail client that's against using AWS in another cloud instance (And I'm sure there are other exceptions out there).
But this is something that negatively impacts Amazon / AWS. I think ultimately though that's a business decision that they are welcome to make for themselves and I don't think really impacts the end AWS user.
On another note, look how Apple both competes with Samsung and use Samsung parts for iPhones.
The industry is all about co- optition
Netflix also don't really have an option, outside of building their own cloud, since Microsoft and Google also have video streaming. It's a little different if you're a Sears or Walmart, and you're not directly competing with the other providers.
Same with Apple and Samsung. Sometimes you're stuck buying from competition because they're the only people making the thing you need. It doesn't mean you're happy about it or wouldn't jump ship if possible.
https://www.se-radio.net/2014/12/episode-216-adrian-cockcrof...
Just noting what I've seen from projects that I've actively worked on first hand.
(Also Walmart and Target are far from the only ones that do this, just using them as examples.)
The rest of the points are much more solid if you can make it past that first flawed one.
If you're building out a new company right now and get to pick your cloud provider, how confident are you that in 5 years, Amazon won't be selling a competing product to yours? And if you're starting from nothing, why not just use GCP or Azure and avoid that risk?
Now, we can argue encryption and principles of least access until we're blue in the face, but when it comes down to it, Walmart execs simply don't want their data on AWS if there are alternatives. And ultimately, that's all that matters.
I don't see it as so much AWS/Google Cloud/Azure is bad, but, did you build something which is impossible to decouple from. That is an upstream cost risk. If a customer can seamlessly move between their own datacenters, AWS, Google, Azure, and so on, that is a good thing.
That is true of every cloud, certainly of Azure and GCP.
Building a "cloud independent" infrastructure is certainly possible, but it puts you at a huge disadvantage - you can't take advantage of any of the value-added services of the cloud provider.
> certainly of Azure and GCP.
Google's Kubernetes strategy means that this is currently not quite true of Google. Google must have decided that they were better off getting a large share of a smaller pie by creating an open sourcing Kubernetes. This seems quite likely to me: if Kubernetes "wins" then the profit margins will shrink due to competition but Google will be in a good position to become the premier Kubernetes hosting provider. And if Kubernetes wins, it'll be much harder for Google to lock in customers. For now and the foreseeable future both our and Google's incentives are aligned vis-a-vis open source Kubernetes. If K8S wins divergence will probably happen, but until then we'll enjoy the benefits.
Google is still a distant 3rd but without the Kubernetes strategy I think they'd be much worse off...
Use higher-level services (or even long-tail features of low-level services) that are differentiated between cloud providers from k8s, you are locked in.
Make k8s auth work cleanly with cloud auth, you're locked in.
Rely on a cloud provider service to manage master and/or worker nodes, you're locked in.
You can avoid lock-in by manually running a k8s cluster while using only the lowest-level services that every cloud providers offers (VM, block store, NFS, load balancer, maybe one or two others), but most people don't actually want to do this.
We'll never get to zero, and I'm sure that Google & Microsoft will eventually put more emphasis on complementary products that increase lock-in. But right now it's trending in the right direction.
11 years in, AWS has never raised prices for any service AFAIK despite holding a near monopoly on public cloud for quite some time.
Also, Amazon's "everything store" mentality pushes it up against industries that have never considered themselves retail before, expanding the definition of "retail" to the breaking point in some cases. A lot of companies have been surprised when Amazon expanded into an area they didn't expect, and given time a lot more companies might because there hasn't yet seemed to be a stop to Amazon's "everything store" expansion.
Even Microsoft lets its employees use Macs if they want. Use the best tool for the job.
How does anyone even find a service where it (or its providers) in some way shape or form don’t run on AWS?
The home field advantages companies have been getting away with lately tend to be tighter integrations (think Chromecast, Android, and Chrome). The only company that would pull something as bad as what's being feared is Oracle.
It's not to say it's entirely rational to boycott AWS like this, but I can understand the origin of it, and it's not like you can easily say no to a Walmart if you're some SaaS startup and they're offering you a massive contract if you can get off of AWS.
The only thing stopping them from routinely cloning stuff they see on AWS is nothing. They are accused of using vendor sales data to decide which products to clone, well that front-row seat watching you scale infers revenue too. Whenever Bezos wants Amazon will assign thousands of developers to cherry-picking SaaS and software to clone.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partn...
Cloning is just practice for many developers.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The reality is, in 2 years, there's a non-trivial likelihood that organizations like that may not be giving out those kinds of contracts at all. Too critical. Too much value add going forward. To own that infrastructure will confer too much competitive advantage for, say, Target to allow Walmart to build that out unchallenged. If you're in the business of serving large retailers services like this, you should probably be wargaming out some possible pivots before the market for those services begins to shrink.
But there's a silver lining to those changes for everyone else, it's entirely possible that these retailers may go into providing those services that are going to start being on the critical path so to speak. Think Walmart and Target building out AWS competitors, or package delivery services, etc etc.
But wmt seems to have mostly woken up and correctly organized their power structure to empower the e-commerce arm. They even brought in an outsider (founder of jet.com).
Is this true? That gives me a warm feeling of hope.
You're hiring a new software engineer. You've got one candidate who's a bonafide genius, but young and can't communicate very well. You've got another candidate who seems to be within 80% of the skill level of the former, but came recommended by a trusted third party and can clearly communicate with the team. Which do you pick?
But that's their whole 'competitive disadvantage'. WaPo and amazon are already separate. The fact that AWS would be separate on paper has very little gravity also.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612335/amazon-is-the-invi...
Also, even in case of a spin-off, I don't really understand why would Jeff Bezos get out of the picture, either — wouldn't he remain the primary shareholder?
Pretty much all of the arguments in the whole article are both invalid and unsound.
The protesters stood up one at a time during the keynote, yelled "Cut ties with ICE", and were escorted out. Then a couple minutes later the next one would start. I don't know whether they were engineers or not, but there was quite a bit of awkward clapping for them, and it cast a shadow over the rest of the event. I spent about half the event googling for what they were talking about, then for AWS alternatives to what I'm using and making plans, and I doubt I was the only one. It was extremely effective.
And why is this bad, exactly?
The fewer orgs use and depend exclusively on AWS, the better we'll all be as an industry.
The whole idea that we'd take years of FLOSS work and stuck it into the black-box cloud which we can't control, is pretty absurd if you think about it.
Here's a good article on the issues:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...