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> It doesn’t mean Amazon the company is a once removed partner of every single company using their infrastructure. I mean, that was my point: that Amazon prefers the optics of not being a partner to these companies, even though, technologically (not financially), there's no difference between what they're doing right now, and what they'd be doing if they ran a "Twitch for porn." Which is why they're just fine with being twice-removed partners to these companies, through vertical integrators. Amazon are fine with e.g. Heroku and other PaaSes repackaging their IaaS services into convenient vertical-specific packages. Amazon don't want to run Heroku; they just want to eat 90% of Heroku's margins. Which essentially gets them all the upside of running Heroku anyway, without the risks of actually going into the PaaS vertical, marketing to small customers, etc. The same logic applies with porn production: Amazon would much rather not create "Twitch for porn", but rather allow someone else to use AWS to create a "Twitch for porn", and then have that service pay AWS exorbitant egress-bandwidth fees. All the same benefit of owning such a company themselves, with none of the hard work, and better yet, none of the tarnish. But also, keep in mind: if 80% of the customers for an infrastructure service are using it for a use-case in the X vertical, then that service is effectively a service-provider in the X vertical, whether it wants to be or not. Even if AWS isn't explicitly running a "Twitch for porn", if 80% of e.g. Kinesis Streams infra is being allocated to transcoding porn, then you'd better believe that the devs for Kinesis Streams, and the ops staff that run it, both know what their service is usually used for — and likely have spent time tuning their service to cope with the particular needs of that workload. To do otherwise would be irresponsible! |