[dakna]

So let me get this straight:

Amazon packages open source software (Linux, Postgres etc) in a way that is an abstracted service (RDS, EBS, Elastic Load Balancer). They add so many abstracted building blocks that you need a special skill set to manage them (Aws Certified Solutions Architect) instead of knowing how to do this with bare metal or a container image running in your own data center.

And now that things are complicated and developers might make mistakes using those services, they add a profiler that inspects your code running in production and a reviewer that ties into the stage before deployment. All just to optimize the use of their own services.

From a business perspective this is an awesome way to get vendor lock-in to a much higher degree. They are basically the certifying authority that tells you if your intellectual property (your code) conforms to their own standard. Yes, they show examples of standard Java optimizations, but it clearly says it detects deviation from best practices for using AWS APIs and SDKs.

And people were mad at Microsoft for shipping a non standards compliant browser as default and enriching it with HTML tags and plugins that would only work in that browser. Little did we know.

I personally wait for the "Amazon Compliant Code" label in the not too distant future as a selling point for business people.

[seibelj]

Amazon has made scalable, performant, high-availability systems constructable by a 10 person team that serves millions or even billions of people. Before AWS it took thousands of people and billions in capital investment to do so.

Sure, google and Microsoft and IBM joined the party, but AWS was first and remains the best holistically. This is their moment of domination, and eventually something will knock them down, but they have made so many companies so nimble and powerful in ways that were impossible before. Go Amazon.

[mythz]

>Before AWS it took thousands of people and billions in capital investment to do so.

WhatsApp Stats (2014):

- 450 million active users, and reached that number faster than any other company in history.

- 50 billion messages every day across seven platforms (inbound + outbound)

- 32 engineers, one developer supports 14 million active users

- $60 million investment from Sequoia Capital

Which they managed their own FreeBSD servers hosted on SoftLayer.

[1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/26/the-whatsapp-archi...

YouTube (2008):

"YouTube grew incredibly fast, to over 100 million video views per day, with only a handful of people responsible for scaling the site"

- 2 sysadmins, 2 scalability software architects

- 2 feature developers, 2 network engineers, 1 DBA

"They went to a colocation arrangement. Now they can customize everything and negotiate their own contracts."

"Sequoia invested a total of $11.5 million in two separate rounds and was the only venture firm to invest in the company." [3]

[2] http://highscalability.com/youtube-architecture

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/business/09cnd-deal.html

[kbenson]

I'm pretty sure GP is mistaking valuation for capital. Serving half a billion or more people probably nets you a billion dollar valuation or more these days, but it in no way requires a billion dollars to provide that service in the vast majority of cases.

There is a sweet spot where cloud is good and provides some benefit but, once you're serving hundreds of millions of people and have double-digit millions in investment, you can probably do significantly better cost-wise rolling your own servers. Worst case, you just throw your own hypervisor management system on them and have most of the same features you got from a cloud service. If you're smart, you can probably architect it so you have on-demand overflow capacity from a cloud provider in case there's a spike you can't account for, which is the best of both worlds.

[pard68]

This is how we do it. Two on prem datacenters, one colo, and a handful of on-the-ready cloud providers. We serve far fewer users, but we also are getting 20 to 50k per user per year. Needless to say, at the scale we have cloud is out of the question except in catastrophic scenarios.

[notatoad]

Back in the day, reddit was definitely serving a couple million users with like three staff and on-prem servers.

and yeah, they were down all the time, but that didn't seem to matter to their growth.

[vidarh]

I've built high-availability systems that served millions with a <10 person team years before AWS even existed, at a time where our server racks had less combined capacity than my laptop does now, and the dual fridge sized storage array we used had less storage (and IO capacity) than the M.2 drive in my laptop does now.

The part of that solution which was related to making the system scalable was written by two of us, who also did other things (it involved a partionable backend storage service, and a user registration service, that combined to let us migrate users between servers to even out load and partition storage; everything else was stateless).

This idea that AWS is necessary to build to scale with small staff just does not match reality. My years of consulting also showed me that I'd earn more from clients who insisted on AWS - they typically spent far more time and resources on devops (and spent far more on hosting overall).

AWS is convenient, and it's great when you can afford it, but it's expensive and still requires substantial devops effort.

[EliRivers]

Go Amazon.

Indeed. Hopefully, soon they'll stop selling physical items in that online store they have and focus on their strengths, so that other companies, who might be able to do better at selling things that aren't so frequently counterfeit that I no longer buy anything from Amazon, can have a go.

[chance_state]

>Before AWS it took thousands of people and billions in capital investment to do so.

Could you expand on this?

I can't tell if you mean to launch a service/company or if you're talking about some large scale.. thing.. I haven't heard of.

[dumbfoundded]

Instagram comes to mind. 13 employees and $1B acquisition.

Hard to imagine that without AWS.

[jakear]

WhatsApp? Similar story, no AWS.

[dumbfoundded]

Well, WhatsApp was started by industry experts in scaling. If you're making a point about functional programming, I'd tend to agree but from a business perspective I'd look to why Netflix still uses AWS: https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Netflix-still-use-AWS

[gurrone]

Still they place FreeBSD running on prem hardware in the ISP PoPs as a caching layer because it absolutely makes sense. https://papers.freebsd.org/2019/FOSDEM/looney-Netflix_and_Fr...

[cupofsludge]

I think people tend to forget how often WhatsApp experienced outages in the early days.

[jakear]

This actually speaks volumes. Yes, people forget. Yes, it’s possible to suffer severe growing pains and still get acquired for $$$$. No, you don’t need to start with everything-AWS to ensure 99.9-whatever% uptime. People forget.

[nine_k]

An $1B acquisition may have nothing to do with any colossal infrastructure. Was it indeed colossal?

[dumbfoundded]

I don't know what you'd consider colossal but the migration doesn't sound fun: https://www.wired.com/2014/06/facebook-instagram/

[vidarh]

Why? Sharding and caching blob storage and activity feeds for Instagram type sites is among the easiest category of sites to scale.

[sitkack]

Not it didn't. This is hyperbole.

[randomidiot666]

Moore's Law made it possible, not AWS.

[didibus]

I'm not saying lock in doesn't exist. But I can't really envision how you would design a full cloud offering without vendor lock in of some sort? Beyond offering all services as open source so you can run them on your own data-center.

I'm being serious, how do you design an API and a set of distributed intercommunicating systems in a way that doesn't couple you with their specific APIs, communication channels and semantics?

I don't think it's possible.

I can see suggesting using open source solutions instead that you run on your own, but that still couples you to those specific solutions, except they're open source so in theory you could fork it and have more control over them. I get that. But this is a different argument I feel. Since the cost of maintaining these open source products on your own is high, and the cost of switching to a different open source solution is as much as moving to another cloud provider.

I think the only form of lock in right now that might seem designed by the business, and not an artifact of the tech itself, is the high price of exporting your data out.

[dakna]

The fact that millions of people were able to read this message almost instantly after it was written, without knowing anything about the device it was written or the location it is coming from, shows it is possible to decouple specifics and adhere to open standards for all players involved. There is just no incentive to do that for what AWS provides. It is a cash cow, exactly because of how useful it is if you have this set of problems they solve.

I think AWS is basically a large SaaS that sells you solutions to problems you have at scale. I don't think the lock in is only in the effort to export data, the lock in is also that a company will use the same building blocks for every new project or new feature on existing projects because their current staff is already trained and new hires don't know how to do it without those services either.

So just like in the 90's nobody got fired for buying IBM, today nobody gets fired for using AWS, even though they don't have problems at the scale AWS is great at.

[phillipcarter]

Lock-in is unavoidable with the cloud and cloud vendors - but I think the issue here is the degree of lock-in and the way people get there. This sort of stuff by AWS is very clearly seen as luring people in with OSS, industry standard, vendor-neutral technologies and then pulling a fast one on them. Whether or not that's the _actual_ goal I can't say, but I can see how it looks that way.

[msluyter]

I'm not saying lock in doesn't exist. But I can't really envision how you would design a full cloud offering without vendor lock in of some sort?

I believe this is what Rackspace was attempting a while ago -- leveraging OpenStack to provide cloud services, so you'd be free from lockin in the sense that you could move to some other OpenStack compatible provider.

[Thorentis]

> "Amazon Compliant Code" label

Wow, this is a scary but very real thought.

Though, the "Certified Windows XP / 7" stickers on hardware and video games / other software was quite common back in the day and isn't too dissimilar.

I would argue that the level of vendor lock-in Amazon is going for is far greater than Microsoft's.

[danhhieu910]

It's not that evil. The first time used AWS, I really enjoyed the power and easy to set up the whole system from scratch everything (network, servers....) If it's on-premise, it'd cost a ton of effort of a lot of ppl. AWS is not that's hard, the console + UI is user friendly and they have a great document site so you don't really need to get these AWS's certs (I had one about 3-4 years and honestly the information in these tests are not helpful, rarely 1 people need to remember a lot of details in 20+ services of amazon, whenever you want to use one just start reading document about it). A new service from AWS - that's great. At least that is a new option for end user.

[adreamingsoul]

Yep.

[sheeshkebab]

Maybe at some point there will be an antitrust lawsuit to unbundle them - and say have compute or storage be provided by a different vendor, all from within their aws management console.

[ken]

I don't care if AWS is big and bundled as long as they use standard interfaces. Linux is big and it doesn't really matter that there's not much competition. I don't care what system (or even virtual machines or containers) runs my program.

If there were an open standard for "way to upload and store and serve files on the web", and S3 happened to implement that standard, and other companies and open-source projects did as well, then it wouldn't matter to me if AWS was the bundling king or not.

There was nothing magical about the design of Unix, either. It's not the only way to make an operating system, or even the best way. It survived because we got many competing implementations which were basically source-compatible. It really took off when we got free clones that anyone could run on their PC.

[didibus]

At this point, S3 IS the standard for that. And Google's and Microsoft's offering all mimic that API. This could happen for all other of their services.

[apocalyptic0n3]

Not just Google and MS, many smaller services too. Linode and Digital Ocean's object storage both use an S3-compatible API and a number of open source, self-hosted services do as well from what I have seen. The S3 API is the defacto standard at this point.