Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jbarham 4393 days ago
> I've never seen Amazon weaken its hold on a particular share of any market.

I can see AWS being squeezed by outfits like Digital Ocean and Linode on the low end and Google Compute/App Engine on the high end. Anecdotally, I used to run some servers on AWS but moved them to DO & Linode as they're cheaper, faster & simpler.
3 comments
mimighost 4393 days ago
AWS is a ecosystem.

While I agree you point that on the lower end Amazon will lose some of its hold to the more cost-effective solution providers, IMHO, it is not facing that much pressure from GAE/GCE, for the reason that the latter is yet to provide a list of service that is as comprehensive AWS's.

https://cloud.google.com/products/ http://aws.amazon.com/

My previous project is about a data warehouse solution using Amazon Redshift. The whole stack is host on AWS: S3 for logs, EMR for ETL then Redshift for ingestion, job flow orchestrated using DataPipeline. One stand solution, work seamlessly. It really makes me appreciate the vastness and integration of AWS as a whole.

link
clarkm 4393 days ago
Yeah, DigitalOcean and Linode are great if you just wanna run some servers. But AWS is much, much more than that.
link
derefr 4393 days ago
It is; I just spent the last two weeks putting together a very handsome CloudFormation template that can attest to that. I'm almost considering creating a custom CF resource provider to let me spawn DigitalOcean droplets, though.

(And to let me use CloudFlare CDN distributions instead of CloudFront ones. Amazon need to either finish CloudFront, or kill it; this purgatorial state where it works but it takes 30 minutes to make any changes, and where only half of its APIs are exposed in the SDK libraries, is obnoxious.)

link
kolev 4393 days ago
I love CloudFormation, but, unfortunately, it's much neglected, doesn't support latest features, and is completely missing major services. The language is so primitive, I had to write custom extensions that compiles to their format. Another rarely used, but very power service is SWF - I bet CF is built entirely on top of it.
link
LewisJEllis 4393 days ago
Amazon's not making their money on random individual users, and companies aren't jumping to migrate away from it. AWS is way more than just a VPS provider.
link