Yes, but those days are numbered. For many years AWS was in a league of its own. Now they’ve fallen badly behind in a growing number of areas and are struggling to catch up.
There’s a ton of momentum associated with the prior dominance, but between the big misses on AI, a general slow pace of innovation on core services, and a steady stream of top leadership and engineers moving elsewhere they’re looking quite vulnerable.
Can you throw out an example or two, because in my experience, AWS is the 'it just works' of the cloud world. There's a service for everything and it works how you'd expect.
I'm not sure what feature they're really missing, but my favorite is the way they handle AWS Fargate. The other cloud providers have similar offerings but I find Fargate to have almost no limitations when compared to the others.
You’ve given a good description of IBM for most of the 80s through the 00s. For the first 20 years of that decline “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” was still considered a truism. I wouldn’t be surprised if AWS pulls it off for as long as IBM did.
I think that the worst thing that can happen to an org is to have that kind of status ("nobody ever got fired for buying our stuff" / "we're the only game in town").
It means no longer being hungry. Then you start making mistakes. You stop innovating. And then you slowly lose whatever kind of edge you had, but you don't realize that you're losing it until it's gone
Unfortunately I think AWS is there now. When you talk to folks there they don’t have great answers to why their services are behind or not as innovative as other things out there. The answer is basically “you should choose AWS because we’re AWS.” It’s not good.
I couldn't agree more, there was clearly a big shift when Jassy became CEO of amazon as a whole and Charlie Bell left (which is also interesting because it's not like azure is magically better now).
The improvements to core services at AWS hasn't really happened at the same pace post covid as it did prior, but that could also have something to do with overall maturity of the ecosystem.
Although it's also largely the case that other cloud providers have also realized that it's hard for them to compete against the core competency of other companies, whereas they'd still be selling the infrastructure the above services are run on.
Given recent earnings and depending on where things end up with AI it’s entirely plausible that by the end of the decade AWS is the #2 or #3 cloud provider.
AWS' core advantage is price. No one cares if they are "behind on AI" or "the VP left." At the end of the day they want a cheap provider. Amazon knows how to deliver good-enough quality at discount prices.
That story was true years ago but I don’t know that it rings true now. AWS is now often among the more expensive options, and with services that are struggling to compete on features and quality.
Simultaneously too confused to be able to make their own UX choices, but smart enough to understand the backend of your infrastructure enough to know why it doesn't work and excuses you for it.
The morning national TV news (BBC) was interrupted with this as breaking news, and about how many services (specifically snapchat for some reason) are down because of problems with "Amazon's Web Services, reported on DownDetector"
I thought we didn't like when things were "too big to fail" (like the banks being bailed out because if we didn't the entire fabric of our economy would collapse; which emboldens them to take more risks and do it again).
A typical manager/customer understands just enough to ask their inferiors to make their f--- cloud platform work, why haven't you fixed it yet? I need it!
In technically sophisticated organizations, this disconnect simply floats to higher levels (e.g. CEO vs. CTO rather than middle manager vs. engineer).
I only got €100.000 bounded to a year, then a 20% discount for spend in the next year.
(I say "only" because that certainly would be a sweeter pill, €100.000 in "free" credits is enough to make you get hooked, because you can really feel the free-ness in the moment).
> In the end, you live with the fact that your service might be down a day or two per year.
This is hilarious. In the 90s we used to have services which ran on machines in cupboards which would go down because the cleaner would unplug them. Even then a day or two per year would be unacceptable.
On one hand it's allows to shift the blame but on other hand is shows a disadvantage of hyper centralization - if AWS is down too many important services are down at the same time which makes it worse. E. g. when AWS is down it's important to have communication/monitoring services UP so engineers can discuss / co-ordinate workarounds and have good visibility but Atlassian was (is) significantly degraded today too.
100%. When AWS was down, we'd say "AWS is down!", and our customers would get it. Saying "Hetzner is down!" raises all sorts of questions your customers aren't interested in.
I've ran a production application off Hetzner for a client for almost a decade and I don't think I have had to tell them "Hetzner is down", ever, apart from planned maintenance windows.
Hosting on second- or even third-tier providers allows you to overprovision and have much better redundancy, provided your solution is architected from the ground up in a vendor agnostic way. Hetzner is dirt cheap, and there are countless cheap and reliable providers spread around the globe (Europe in my case) to host a fleet of stateless containers that never fail simultaneously.
Stateful services are much more difficult, but replication and failover is not rocket science. 30 minutes of downtime or 30 seconds of data loss rarely kill businesses. On the contrary, unrealistic RTOs and RPOs are, in my experience, more dangerous, either as increased complexity or as vendor lock-in.
Customers don't expect 100% availability and noone offers such SLAs. But for most businesses, 99.95% is perfecty acceplable, and it is not difficult to have less than 4h/year of downtime.
The point seems to be not that Hetzner will never have an outage, but rather that they have a track record of not having outages large enough for everyone to be affected.
Seems like large cloud providers, including AWS, are down quite regularly in comparison, and at such a scale that everything breaks for everyone involved.
> The point seems to be not that Hetzner will never have an outage, but rather that they have a track record of not having outages large enough for everyone to be affected.
If I am affected, I want everyone to be affected, from a messaging perspective
Okay, that helps for the case when you are affected. But what about the case when you are not affected and everyone else is? Doesn't that seem like good PR?
Take the hit of being down once every 10 years compared to being up for the remaining 9 that others are down.
> An Amazon Web Services outage is causing major disruptions around the world. The service provides remote computing services to many governments, universities and companies, including The Boston Globe.
> On DownDetector, a website that tracks online outages, users reported issues with Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite online broker Robinhood, the McDonald’s app and many other services.
That's actually a fairly decent description for the non-tech crowd and I am going to adopt it, as my company is in the cloud native services space and I often have a problem explaining the technical and business model to my non-technical relatives and family - I get bogged down in trying to explain software defined hardware and similar concepts...
I asked ChatGPT for a succinct definition, and I thought it was pretty good:
“Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform that provides on-demand access to computing power, storage, databases, and other IT resources over the internet, allowing businesses to scale and pay only for what they use.”
For us techies yes, but to the regular folks that is just as good as our usual technical gobbledy-gook - most people don´t differentiate between a database and a hard-drive.
> access to computing power, storage, databases, and other IT resources
could be simplified to: access to computer servers
Most people who know little about computers can still imagine a giant mainframe they saw in a movie with a bunch of blinking lights. Not so different, visually, from a modern data center.
