The joys of partnering with the gorilla. Amazon are trying to own the concept of cloud, at least in the IaaS space.
With the consolidation to the big cloud vendors, the pain the cloud giants put on their minnow partners are only going to get worse. And I am not sure what can be done about it.
In this case the answer is clear: when you build a cloud app, take the effort to make it multi-cloud, so you can bail out when any one cloud gets too domineering, or just too expensive.
This is the primary reason that I'm reluctant to build on Datomic Ions. They have made an explicit decision to build it for AWS only.
Sure, But this is about "Partners". Some such as consultants and MSPs. These organisations are typically providing the strategy to less technically savvy companies.
Some others are the technology vendors who are producing the tools to provide higher level cloud management tools. This will limit the ability of these companies to both be a partner and to have promote multi-cloud tools in their portfolio.
It should be noted why: Rich explained in the NYC Ions talk that they believe in using native platform capabilities directly. Multi-cloud abstraction layers is a lowest common denominator experience. Refer also to Simple Made Easy comments about ORM.
> AWS won’t even let partners use the word “partner” in some cases. When it comes to joint engineering or co-development, AWS won’t let partners use the words “partner,” “partnership,” “partnering” or “alliance,” opting for terms like “agreement,” “teamed,” or “in cooperation” instead.
The not very cynical take is, the person(s) responsible for this had too wide a mandate to dictate language and went overboard.
The cynical take is that this puts partners into a position where they almost certainly will violate the guidelines. This is like making jaywalking a crime. If you make something everyone does a crime, you can selectively prosecute the people you don't like, so language like this makes it easy to tell any partner offering services AWS doesn't like they're violating the rules.
The conversation will go something like this:
(Satire follows.)
Partner: How can we get right with AWS?
Amazon: Well, easy, you just need to stop advertising that you're partners.
Partner: So after we went to the effort of forming an agreement with Amazon and becoming partners, we can't advertise it? Advertising our services as partners helps drive new customers our way!
Amazon: Well, that seems like a you problem. It's plain as day, the rules say you can't advertise yourselves as partners in the AWS Partner Network brand guidelines.
Partner: What about $other_partners?
Amazon: We can't comment on our relationship with other individuals or businesses, have a great day!
Here is the thing. The word "partner" is legal velcro. Amazon does not want a judge to determine that you are a PARTNER of Amazon's in the legal sense of the word. Even calling it the "Amazon Partner Network" is profoundly stupid, IMHO.
Partner means a different thing in contract litigation than it does in casual English usage.
The actual reason is that Amazon doesn't want anyone making a buck of Amazon's name. They are ruthless about capturing all the value in a relationship. Amazon does things like require 1+yr free trials of enterprise software and charging for the privilege of not being under NDA.
Guess what! My wife is a lawyer at Oracle. And she knows. And guess what else? Marketing owns the wording of marketing collateral, and can ignore the advice of the lawyers, and then the lawyers get to clean up the resulting problems.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments, and especially stop posting personal swipes, to HN? We've had to ask you this before. Continuing will eventually get your account banned here. I'm sure you can make your substantive points in a thoughtful way if you want to.
That stance is pretty clear when you take into consideration data egress costs, which are pretty high and makes cross-cloud deployments usually more expensive than using the AWS alternatives.
The article title and contents appear to be intentionally inflammatory: "AWS forbids partners even mentioning multi-cloud!" Except that's not true. A more accurate title would be "AWS won't participate in co-branded marketing campaigns that promote competing clouds".
I'm not an expert on this topic, and have no familiarity with the co-branding guide beyond having just read it, but it appears to describe the conditions for AWS and other companies to work together on a co-branded marketing campaign. From the guide:
> Co-branding occurs when AWS and an APN Partner ... agree to work together to achieve a shared marketing goal.
I see no restrictions on partners having or advertising multi-cloud solutions on their own. The guide just says that AWS isn't willing to participate in marketing campaigns that mention them. Here is the entire relevant section:
> APN Partners should not promote the use of their solutions on other cloud platforms in joint marketing activities or in high-visibility assets used at our events ... The focus of these assets and campaigns should be on customer success with AWS Cloud. If you prefer not to reference AWS specifically, you may reference "the cloud" or "your cloud". Booth collateral, such as data sheets, flyers, and whitepapers may reference all the specific cloud platforms that the APN Partner's solution runs on. [emphasis mine]
Thus the article seems to misconstrue the issue, and the truth seems to be merely that AWS isn't willing to participate in marketing campaigns that promote competitors.
I met with a Rackspace rep today who explained how they can support AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and of course their own cloud, including several simultaneously.
Not sure what this article is referring to but it did not seem to be restricting that particular relationship.
Meanwhile, at Microsoft and Google events, the corporations trip over their own tongues trying to say multi-cloud too many times in one sentence.
I suppose the #1 player wants customers not to be told that other players even exist, and the other players want to talk about the advantages of using the #1 player and ALSO them.
28 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 65.7 ms ] threadGood luck making smart friends Amazon.
With the consolidation to the big cloud vendors, the pain the cloud giants put on their minnow partners are only going to get worse. And I am not sure what can be done about it.
In this case the answer is clear: when you build a cloud app, take the effort to make it multi-cloud, so you can bail out when any one cloud gets too domineering, or just too expensive.
This is the primary reason that I'm reluctant to build on Datomic Ions. They have made an explicit decision to build it for AWS only.
Though that is only a good solution for a large enough org.
Some others are the technology vendors who are producing the tools to provide higher level cloud management tools. This will limit the ability of these companies to both be a partner and to have promote multi-cloud tools in their portfolio.
> AWS won’t even let partners use the word “partner” in some cases. When it comes to joint engineering or co-development, AWS won’t let partners use the words “partner,” “partnership,” “partnering” or “alliance,” opting for terms like “agreement,” “teamed,” or “in cooperation” instead.
The not very cynical take is, the person(s) responsible for this had too wide a mandate to dictate language and went overboard.
The cynical take is that this puts partners into a position where they almost certainly will violate the guidelines. This is like making jaywalking a crime. If you make something everyone does a crime, you can selectively prosecute the people you don't like, so language like this makes it easy to tell any partner offering services AWS doesn't like they're violating the rules.
The conversation will go something like this:
(Satire follows.)
Partner: How can we get right with AWS?
Amazon: Well, easy, you just need to stop advertising that you're partners.
Partner: So after we went to the effort of forming an agreement with Amazon and becoming partners, we can't advertise it? Advertising our services as partners helps drive new customers our way!
Amazon: Well, that seems like a you problem. It's plain as day, the rules say you can't advertise yourselves as partners in the AWS Partner Network brand guidelines.
Partner: What about $other_partners?
Amazon: We can't comment on our relationship with other individuals or businesses, have a great day!
Partner means a different thing in contract litigation than it does in casual English usage.
https://partner.microsoft.com/en-US/
Nor Oracle?
https://www.oracle.com/partners/index.html
Nor Google? https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9028757?hl=en
The actual reason is that Amazon doesn't want anyone making a buck of Amazon's name. They are ruthless about capturing all the value in a relationship. Amazon does things like require 1+yr free trials of enterprise software and charging for the privilege of not being under NDA.
If Amazon was mainly worried that a judge would interpret partner in the legal sense, wouldn't it be more concerned about its own use of the word?
edit: removed non-citable claims
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm not an expert on this topic, and have no familiarity with the co-branding guide beyond having just read it, but it appears to describe the conditions for AWS and other companies to work together on a co-branded marketing campaign. From the guide:
> Co-branding occurs when AWS and an APN Partner ... agree to work together to achieve a shared marketing goal.
I see no restrictions on partners having or advertising multi-cloud solutions on their own. The guide just says that AWS isn't willing to participate in marketing campaigns that mention them. Here is the entire relevant section:
> APN Partners should not promote the use of their solutions on other cloud platforms in joint marketing activities or in high-visibility assets used at our events ... The focus of these assets and campaigns should be on customer success with AWS Cloud. If you prefer not to reference AWS specifically, you may reference "the cloud" or "your cloud". Booth collateral, such as data sheets, flyers, and whitepapers may reference all the specific cloud platforms that the APN Partner's solution runs on. [emphasis mine]
Thus the article seems to misconstrue the issue, and the truth seems to be merely that AWS isn't willing to participate in marketing campaigns that promote competitors.
Not sure what this article is referring to but it did not seem to be restricting that particular relationship.
I suppose the #1 player wants customers not to be told that other players even exist, and the other players want to talk about the advantages of using the #1 player and ALSO them.
The problem I would see is the fact that the service needs to be built as a whole.
In the past when I used multiple cloud services it was very easy to build a single cloud solution and the cost of each version would increase.
In the past I used a single cloud provider to build and deploy the entire AWS ec2-core infrastructure.
It is not too bad for the AWS-core business but I would much rather have a single cloud service built in than rely on one provider.