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by SemioticStandrd 903 days ago
He’s absolutely correct about the ridiculous complexity of cloud tooling. The number of services, features, knobs, etc., available in AWS is borderline comical. I’m skeptical that half of the products they have really fill a gap and solve problems people had. Who’s asking for all of these new services that are constantly being rolled out? There’s so much cruft in their product offerings. Promotion at AWS is kind of like how it is at Google now, where a product is launched because someone needs to get their L8, not because customers are asking for it.
2 comments
Nextgrid 903 days ago
To be fair, you don't have to use those features. Stick to the commodities like EC2, S3, and maybe managed databases. You might however notice that you're being ripped off and a crater is forming in your bank account.

Those specialized services are often about trading-off vendor-lock-in in exchange for cost-savings. Sometimes these savings are real but more often they're just perceived due to the disparate billing models (some services bill per the hour, some per-request, some per-GB of traffic, etc) so it makes it hard to estimate or understand what exactly you're paying for and which areas can be optimized.

At the end of the day there is no such thing as a free lunch. AWS' margins must come from somewhere, and they would not be offering a product at a loss.

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ksec 902 days ago
>Stick to the commodities like EC2, S3, and maybe managed databases.

The problem is they are increasingly not a commodity. Not only EC2 or S3 but also bandwidth / transfer. The price disparity between EC2 and 2nd tier Cloud Provider like DigitalOcean or Linode continues to grow every year. And the gap between DO and 3rd tier continue to grow also.

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toomuchtodo 903 days ago
AWS employs ~60k people for sales and marketing and has an operating margin of ~30%. There is room for margin compression.
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pharmakom 903 days ago
It’s all about lock in. AWS has a bunch of features that you could implement yourself in an afternoon with a few EC2s, but it’s much easier to click the checkbox. Repeat this across an entire org for a few years and you are deeply coupled to AWS. They are anti features in that sense.
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Nextgrid 903 days ago
In some cases you end up writing more glue code to shoehorn some AWS service into your workflow than just implementing the functionality yourself.
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