[veleek]

“Made our customers happy by allowing them to easily migrate to a self-hosted redis instance in AWS so they were able to build their business and brought in twice as much traffic”.

Your comment echos the crux of the article. Yes, this probably wasn’t an explicit goal for AWS, but the end result is that people aren’t using Amazon’s products because they’re the best, they’re just using them because it’s harder to change or more expensive not to (when it could be cheaper if the playing field was level).

[TheNewsIsHere]

> Your comment echos the crux of the article. Yes, this probably wasn’t an explicit goal for AWS, but the end result is that people aren’t using Amazon’s products because they’re the best, they’re just using them because it’s harder to change or more expensive not to (when it could be cheaper if the playing field was level).

I think you hit the nail on the head, at least regarding my own experiences.

Most of the time when a colleague says “hey we can use X service because Y” in AWS, the “Y” is something along the lines of “because it’s just easier to use Z with it,” where “Z” is another AWS service.

AWS has many impressive tools. That doesn’t mean they’re built with friendliness in mind. Their tools are meant to provide value for money, but a lot of that value is predicated on using other tools they provide. They’re building a platform, not -your- platform.

We learned that lesson early on with my business. We ultimately replaced all but 2-3 AWS services with third parties that were actually best-in-class, and kept the 2-3 from AWS that AWS can honestly say are best in class. It was ultimately more expensive and kludgy to build everything on AWS rather than diversify our stack.