

Is Amazon a tyrant or a saint? - cardmagic

Saint:<p>* Inventing IaaS APIs<p>* Tirelessly innovating new APIs for resources like DynamoDB<p>* Pioneering resource-based hourly pricing<p>* Consistent API design<p>* A huge number of services<p>Tyrant:<p>* EBS sucks and they can't seem to ever fix it<p>* Beanstalk is a terrible excuse for a PaaS<p>* Completely locked into the AWS ecosystem<p>* Every new service you try locks you down even more<p>* Servers can and do go down without notice<p>* Can't run AWS on premise<p>How do you feel about AWS? Best thing since sliced bread? Best of all evils? If there was something better, you'd move in a heart beat?
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SlipperySlope
Timesharing is an idea from the 1960's that has been re-imagined by Amazon as
they enforced service-oriented architecture on all their enterprise systems in
a Draconian manner.

On balance, Amazon is a saint. Despite its faults it has dramatically solved
development, deployment and scalability problems faced by thousands and
thousands of startups.

How many startups could get going if they needed to spend $50 K on colocation,
servers and bandwidth? That's what happened back in the Dot-Com boom.

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wmf
What is Amazon supposed to do about the lock-in? Not innovate? Give their code
to their competitors?

Also, I don't think you can blame them for hardware failures.

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bmelton
There's a LOT of space between saint and tyrant, and I'd guess that Amazon
falls into that space (as almost everybody does).

Regarding your 'Tyrant' arguments: * EBS sucks and they can't seem to ever fix
it

Maybe durable, reliable, cheap and flexible storage isn't that easy to do?

* Beanstalk is a terrible excuse for a PaaS

Haven't used it, so I can't really comment.

* Completely locked into the AWS ecosystem

How so? I mean, they have a few proprietaryish services, but at least from my
usage, I haven't found anything that I couldn't replace with something else.
SNS? Email. EC2? Dedicated server. Elastic Block? Disks. I haven't used
Dynamo, but I got the sense that it was just another NoSQL store?

* Servers can and do go down without notice

EC2 instances are designed to be ephemeral. If you're worried that they are
going down, you've probably built your app incorrectly. It isn't meant to be
used in lieu of a dedicated server, and it shouldn't be used as such. That's
not how their compute units are meant to be used.

* Can't run AWS on premise

They're selling compute time. I mean, sure, they _could_ open source their
stuff, but most of their infrastructure is based on open source utilities that
you could replace easily. Do we call Dropbox a tyrant for not releasing their
source? No. The 'ease of use' is their entire business model.

As to actually answering the question, I like Amazon. I use some of their
services where it makes sense to, but I don't think they're the greatest thing
ever. They certainly have a good set of utilities, but it doesn't fit every
use case.

For small utilization / commodity web needs you've got your typical web hosts.
Dreamhost, ASmallOrange, etc.

For slightly larger needs you've got VPSes. Linode, Slicehost, etc.

Slightly larger than that and you're in single dedicated server territory.

For data intensive or computation expensive needs, you've got Amazon.

Bigger than that, and you're on big hardware from (dating myself here) Sun or
IBM (and possibly using S3 for storage, because it's bad ass.)

