
Ask HN: AWS or bust? Support the AWS services or compete with them? - xchaotic
We are a small shop which provides a fairly niche product which does well in its category.
Amazon doesn&#x27;t offer anything equivalent and probably never will as the total market is too small.
However many of our customers increasingly decide to use AWS for hosting.
The end result is:
a)we need to support a lot of things that are really AWS issues, DNS in AWS VPC etc.)
b)customers often end up spending more on AWS than us
c)customers expectations are that we integrate well with AWS - they find a feature of  AWS and they expect the same from us<p>Which leads me to think in the following directions:
a) deny all this, offer our product as rpm until existing contracts run dry, buy a boat and retire (or work at dark Amazon warehouse)
b) actively support and grow our AWS integrations - the outcome will be more customers but paying mostly to Amazon and our resources will be spent on integration work rather than developing the core product, but it might be a way to survive and &#x27;scrape by&#x27;
c) compete with Amazon, by offering similar managed services, hosting etc I don&#x27;t think we have the resources to do it and even if we did I don&#x27;t think many customers would go for it as they prefer to &#x27;standardise&#x27; on AWS. Even if they did and we wanted to offer similar pricing, we&#x27;d be taking a hit as we don&#x27;t have the economies of scale, but it could be profitable if could keep up.<p>What do you think the best strategy is? Until recently I had though it is to do one thing well, but it doesn&#x27;t seem to be working too well for us anymore.
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xchaotic
I will be very grateful for stories, opinions, links and I can provide more
background or details if necessary.

