[ernestbro]

Strange one from Amazon. They've always provided cloud infrastructure services for building and launching apps, QuickSight departs from this - it's a ready to use app.

The logic must be: more money in apps than infrastructure.

Opposite of Google, they have the apps and now want the infrastructure too - I think it's a mistake for Amazon to go down this route, there is too much competition in this space and so far playing with QuickSight I don't see anything new/different from other analytics apps available on Amazon marketplace [1].

It feels like an experiment vs. a new direction for the company

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/b/2649336011?ref_=gtw_nav...

[jasode]

>I don't see anything new/different from other analytics apps available on Amazon marketplace [1].

I'm not familiar enough with all those alternatives you cited to make a feature-by-feature comparison but one key difference is those other tools all use AMI (vm images). The Amazon QuickSight doesn't seem to need a deployment and management of any AMI. The customer just uploads a csv or Excel or points at a data source like Salesforce and instantly starts slicing & dicing the data. QuickSight seems to be positioned similar to Google's Data Studio offering.

>The logic must be: more money in apps than infrastructure.

That seems inevitable. Amazon AWS proved that IaaS being higher up the value chain than bare-metal services was more profitable. Rackspace's decline was proof of that. To continue the climb up the value chain, everybody including Google Cloud and MS Azure is offering higher valued-added services. Even a company like Github couldn't survive purely on on hosted Git disk space. (A "dumb" data pipe and disk space to a shared git repo.) They are moving up the value chain to build out full life-cycle project management to compete with MS Visual Team in the cloud.

[candiodari]

There's also that they seriously undercut the marketplace solutions in price. As said before - this is typical for Amazon.

[ignoramous]

AWS continues to invest in IaaS as well as PaaS. Investing in one doesn't mean it is sidelining the other.

PaaS is an important market, and it'd be suicidal for AWS to not leverage its IaaS offerings and build platforms on top. This is kind of what Google does with its apps on Android. They have a replacement for every popular app out there that isn't a game.

In this app economy, something like Google Firebase is going to be a huge player if isn't already and that's the segment you can't compete with if you don't have PaaS offerings.

With Google controlling the entirety of developer ecosystem on Android which is the most dominant phone OS by far via Google Play, it is paramount that AWS doesn't turn a blind eye to it.

In a way, GCP might well be the most widely used Cloud Platform out there by virtue of Google Play integrations in billions of Android Phones, we are choosing to ignore that fact at our own peril.

AWS packages itself as a great enterprise offering. But GCP cloud take over business that are mobile first (Snapchat, for instance), I'd say, if competitors like AWS stop innovating and building.

[ernestbro]

Wouldnt QuickSight be a SaaS product (not PaaS)?

[0xmohit]

It's possibly targeted at those who have never made use of analytics, but might think of it if it comes with minimal effort (and price).

AWS generally tends to complement its offerings such that they can avoid most of existing users of one or more services from looking at other alternates.

[adzicg]

they already offer workmail, remote desktops etc at a similar model (some small dollar amount per month per user). I think this is probably aimed at people whose data is in AWS anyway, so they can get it into dashboards for marketing analysis easier.

if you want api-level analytics stuff and dashboards, have a look at amazon mobile analytics. it's an interesting alternative to google analytics that lets you control the session key (so it's easy to correlate events from front-end and back-end), and the event data is also yours (so it can easily be exported).

[ernestbro]

Didn't know about workmail! I suppose that's closer to an infrastructure product vs an app like analytics. Isn't a mail server just an API for mail clients to connect to?

[Techbrunch]

I think it makes sense, I was quite reluctant to use another service to do this kind of analysis where you might need to give complete access to your DB. If you are already using aws to host your database then it stays within the Amazon realm.

[misiti3780]

so many people are using RDS, why not create a BI tool that is cheaper than looker that is easy to integrate into your workflows. seems like a win-win to me.

[mbesto]

It's to enhance lock-in for your data hosting.