[tanilama]

AWS prioritizes launch above EVERYTHING. It is their strategy, to have market tells them what to build.

I think it works, and AWS has yet been brought down by this horizontal complexity. Quite an achievement, but might not be a satisfying experience for the engineers work there.

[talawahdotnet]

It makes sense in terms of feeling out the market as well. If this version of the service takes off it validates the decision to proceed with a more complex/scalable version and it gives them more customer feedback. Standard MVP best practices.

The downside is that a lot of their products lack polish which sucks. On the flip side even when they are launched with minimal features, they do tend to be reliable, durable and secure, which is important when it comes to data related services.

[danpalmer]

This is one of the main reasons why I don't like AWS services, everything just seems so half-finished. There's not a lot in AWS that I would trust enough to use in production.

I wonder how widespread this view is. I suspect it's more widespread than Amazon realise. They may have optimised into a local maximum where they get a lot of value from being first to market, but could potentially get more by being first to "viable to trust a business on".

[talawahdotnet]

I certainly agree that they seem half finished in terms of features and developer experience, but from the point of view of security and data durability they have an excellent reputation. They typically have a pretty good reliability story as well, but it relies on the customer architecture their solution to take advantage of multiple AZs/Regions, which is often not trivial.

As far as being "viable to trust a business on" the numbers don't lie, AWS is number one because customers are running their businesses on AWS. The fact that DocumentDB launched with supporting quotes from Capital One, Dow Jones and WaPo shows that customers were clamoring to use it even before GA.

Remember a lot of these customers are coming to AWS because they tried doing themselves and stuggled. When it comes to data, customers trust AWS more than they trust themselves, and rightly so.

[ctvo]

What's your definition of production ready? AWS services when launched "half-finished" still do not have outages, data lost or security issues. They also come with metrics and enough monitoring to support them in production. Those are the major checkboxes for production ready.

AWS also has not had a reputation for deprecating services it launches. I find very little risk in taking a dependency on something AWS releases.

[jjeaff]

You mean if they used a different strategy, they might have more than the entire one third market share of the entire cloud hosting industry?

[manigandham]

>> "viable to trust a business on"

They already are viable and trusted by multiple billion-dollar companies and governments.