I get not wanting to pay for the open source software you use. I don't get why so little code is contributed back upstream.
I'd expect this to increase in intensity. (Disclosure: I work there.)
Amazon is a business, not a charity.
Someone with experience/knowledge in this area tell me if I'm off my rocker. I know it sounds too simple. But why wouldn't this work?
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/mongodb-open-source-server-sid...
Cloud Foundry (and things like it) does a reasonable job of separating those things for "applications", ie web apps, pretty well, but didn't have an equivalent for data services. Nobody was quite sure what it should look like.
I suppose part of Kubernetes's success has been that it looks like a solution to this. I'm not sure how well it really works, though.
If something like this worked, it would technically enable a marketplace model, where AWS or GCP do their efficient hardware thing, then the software experts provide a value-added service on top of that. What we would then be missing is a way to economically enable that model, where it doesn't make sense for AWS etc to just provide their own version of the service and capture all the profit.
To see the issues around cloud and open source right now, you only have to look at who's winning: enterprise consultants such as Dell EMC, HPe, Accenture, IBM, etc.
They are the ones pushing broad K8S adoption at the edge. And in the next generation it will probably come down to a new crop of ISVs to solve issues around data portability, vendor lock-in, security, pricing arbitrage, and training.
This pitch may have been mentioned in passing to me but I don't remember. From the perspective of I and many others who ultimately solved the scalability issues, the MySQL boat was simultaneously sinking and on fire, while nobody knew who the captain was supposed to be. An insurance policy that promised that somebody with a badge would dedicate 8 hours a month to buffing out scratches was not useful.
It was less "it's OSS, we don't need to pay" and more "only God can help us now".
Despite all of the wide eyed idealists architects, at a certain scale you are always locked into your infrastructure choices. No your CTO is not going to migrate from your six figure Oracle installation because you use the repository pattern to abstract your database access. There are far too many risks and too many chances for regressions with little pay off to migrate from a working infrastructure.
Seriously though it's hard to not read between the lines on this. There seems to be more between the lines than lines somehow. I need a shower to rinse the bias off me now.
> one insanely-complex routine task that we do all the time is hiring. You know what the LPs are at hiring time? A checklist. Now even the typical all-day interview marathon isn’t gonna reliably dig into every LP, but we do an acceptable job of taking a close look at enough of them. I believe that’s very helpful in bringing down the asshole ratio.
In my personal and second degree experience with Amazon and AWS hiring, the application of the LPs by interviewers doesn't work nearly as well as most of them seem to think, and it often devolves into a mostly arbitrary hazing ritual. I'm willing to believe that AWS has fewer assholes, and that you can't excel at operations while an asshole, but I've seen too many bar raisers who acted as arrogant know-it-alls and made completely capricious, arbitrary and damaging decisions.
Having spent a two year tour in AWS, I think it's fair to say AWS has a pretty decent monopoly on assholes, and that they excel at operations despite that.
Then why not pay a fraction of the money you're earning on offering these tools back to the open source community? Using something like GitHub's new funding tools?
> Google Cloud’s recent Open Source partnerships are interesting. I look at that list of companies and it’s not obvious to me that they’re going to offer better operational excellence than Google’s, but maybe I’m wrong. It’s an interesting and probably useful experiment.
This is true spirit of Amazon i.e partners are competition to be killed.
> At the end of the day I’m not that worried. Most of us who’ve open-sourced stuff love the creative process for its own sake; touching and improving other engineers’ lives. The skillset evidenced by having done so will probably help you get really good jobs.
Wow I am just amazed at the callousness of this suggestion. So he wants developers to create good software out of love and free of cost and then toil for his company while he mint the customers. At least he is transparent about his intentions.
I'm sure Microsoft engineers felt similarly about democratizing computation in the 90s. Then the quote would have been "People just want point and click ease... They don't care about who their software dollars go to".
And yea. That's right. People don't vote fairly with their dollars. That's where regulators come in to ensure a level playing field.
"Embrace, extend, extinguish". Never forget. We've seen this show before.
Well, AWS at least offers the marketplace for indie developers to offer their images (with a markup for billing which is ok I guess). If AWS is serious about a sustainable economic model for software developers, then they could start to expand this offering and make it more prominent (I haven't heard much about it in a long while), building it on mainstream Linux distros rather than AWS Linux, etc. What I'm seeing on AWS marketplace and places such as DockerHub, though, are mostly repackaged F/OSS convenience builds rather than original applications. And AWS could have made a stance here by selling eg. Mongo DB images from the marketplace rather than going for Mongo's customers with their own offering. I guess it's better than on Azure and Google Cloud at least, where you need a partnership deal to even be able to sell images.
