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0 pointscornholio7y ago0 comments

I think it's a justifiable reaction, similar to the one after Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub. When an 800 pounds gorilla pays a bunch of cash to acquire a successful independent product, they do so either to quench a potential rival or to embrace and extend into that field and leverage their traditional offering. It makes sense from a business perspective, and they are the only ones capable of paying that much cash precisely because they can use the leverage.

For example, I myself wouldn't touch any service from Amazon with a ten foot pole. I acknowledge their role in starting the cloud revolution, but every business move of that company down to the design of the last web button is to set itself up as a monopoly in the fields it enters. They are the Apple of everything.

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amenod7y ago

Genuinly curious: is there a (relatively cheap) cloud vendor that doesn't do that? MS & G seem pretty similar to me...

rectang7y ago

The interests of platform vendors and developers are not aligned.

Developers want their skills to be portable, in order to maximize the market for their labor. Platform vendors want you to stick with their offerings in order to maximize the value of the platform.

Even so, vendors can choose how high to dial up the pain they inflict on developers who dare to wander. Trying to develop websites that worked across multiple browsers a decade ago was incredibly painful because of Microsoft dragging its feet on standards compliance for IE. It was so bad that many developers from that era will bear a grudge towards Microsoft for the rest of their lives.

I always laugh bitterly when I hear from a vendor about how much they care about developers. If you really cared about developers you wouldn't make our lives so damn difficult. A huge chunk of my life has been lost to switching costs.

Probably the best remedy is to use developer-governed FOSS platforms whenever possible. The perverse incentives towards lockin don't go away entirely, but they are much less.

Can_Not7y ago

Digital Ocean is a traditional VPS provider who recently added a product that competes with AWS S3 and a product that is docker hosting as a service, which I hope is a valid alternative to EC2 autoscaling. They have a thing with gitlab to run your continuous integration pipeline. They have a few more things.

Heroku is a platform as a service. They provide an alternative to EC2 autoscaling. Also available is postgre, Kafka, redis, MongoDB, MySQL, and a few other things I rudely assumed aren't important enough to mention as a service.

Vultr and linode also offer block storage in addition to traditional VPSs.

Ovh has something called object storage.

Auth0 is willing to be your "user authentication as a service" which also includes something like AWS lambda.

Spotinst will help you get cheap "spot instances" for AWS/GCP/Azure. They also have an AWS lambda competitor and an object storage (I think this one is literally a JSON object storage for your FaaS, not actual files). Not much of a primary service provider.

I consider AWS, GCP, and Azure to be megacorporate monopolies and would prefer to support an underdog. But I'm not aware of any 4rth competitor that comes close to what those 3 actually are. The ones I mentioned probably average at 10% and maybe DO or heroku peaks at 40%.

I would love to hear more about cloud providers who are becoming more than just VPSs to take on AWS.

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