
Unbundling AWS - taylorwc
https://www.tclauson.com/2019/09/11/Unbundling-AWS.html
======
parhamn
One major thing this doesn't consider is the technical limitations which are
latency & bandwidth.

(1) You save a ton of money on bandwidth when you move data from AWS to AWS

(2) Your stack, in most cases, needs to be near each other to minimize
latency. Databases get wrecked by this.

This is why, cloud database providers have to often transparently show you
which cloud you're launching on [1] which effectively means AWS is going to
get a good share of it anyway. My uninformed guess is that EC2&S3 are by far
their biggest money maker which is going to be what unbundlers target.

I'm all for the unbundling and will probably take part in some of it, but I
don't think it will be that easy.

[1]
[https://www.cockroachlabs.com/product/cockroachcloud](https://www.cockroachlabs.com/product/cockroachcloud)

~~~
driverdan
> You save a ton of money on bandwidth when you move data from AWS to AWS

This is only because AWS grossly overcharges for bandwidth. If you move all
services that have high bandwidth requirements to providers with reasonable
prices you'll save a significant amount of money.

~~~
phamilton
Within a single AZ. Inter AZ is charged. It's also frustrating that AWS infra
doesn't optimize for same AZ (and only fall back to another AZ if an AZ is
impaired). For example, a client in us-east-1a can hit the Aurora reader
endpoint and be directed to an instance in 1b even though there's a healthy
instance in 1a.

------
angry_octet
Once you have significant data on AWS it costs you so much to transfer it you
are stuck with them. Their data fees are insane, and so are their storage
fees.

Also, AWS is slow. If I have a filer with 500TB of disk I should be getting
5-10GiBy/s reads, and burst writes should be that fast too. With EFS I get
200MiBy/s MAX. Likewise EBS and emphemeral SSDs top out at 250MiBy/s, which is
just abysmal.

AWS security is so complicated now, at the control plane layer, that hardly
anyone understands it.

So if there was a competitor that gave real hardware performance and a simpler
security validation at a reasonable price, they could win business. But I
don't see Oracle/Azure/GCP etc doing that.

~~~
driverdan
> AWS security is so complicated now, at the control plane layer, that hardly
> anyone understands it.

IAM and security management are the worst parts of AWS. It's complex an
unintuitive. I always second guess my choices, wondering if I've left a gaping
security hole somewhere.

~~~
ledgerdev
I too have been wondering the same. Does anyone else see a need for some
external service that examines resources/permissions and give a clear picture
and ongoing monitoring for changes? Are there any services that already do
this well?

~~~
edoceo
Amazon makes one
[https://aws.amazon.com/config/](https://aws.amazon.com/config/)

------
streetcat1
The analogy in the article is wrong. Aws is not a marketplace and does not
enjoy network effects.

I.e. if developer A uses AWS, this does not affect developer B.

What AWS enjoy is economy of scale (huge capex) which should help reduce price
(but I am not sure that this is happening), and being first to market (Nobody
got fired for choosing IBM).

Basically the main value prop today, as I see it, is saving the operation
costs (human cost), by offloading them to amazon.

This will be solved by Kubernetes operators.

Moreover, most of the new computational intensive workload (E.g. IOT / AI ) is
better done on the edge.

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
There are more than one type of network effects. This one is called "Indirect
network effect". What you have written is direct network effect.

As more developers start using AWS, there forms a large developer ecosystem
around AWS tools and services, and therefore "developer B" will find it much
easier and cheaper to use AWS, indirectly.

~~~
crazygringo
I don't think that indirect network effect is particularly strong in this
case, though.

There are similar ecosystems around Azure and Google Cloud, and there are
plenty of tools that support all 3 clouds equally.

I really don't think AWS is getting any kind of meaningful competitive
advantage here these days. And if there's any at all, it's dwarfed by
technical, financial, and strategic factors.

~~~
lmeyerov
In BigCorp, which is ~half of all business, there is consistent pressure to
standardize: cost, security, education, etc. There are all sorts of other
levers too, like negotiated group deals -- at places like Netflix, AWS is
effectively free, while any other vendor requires going through procurement.
Competing with a negotiated loss leader - free - sucks. Azure benefits a LOT
here due to other MS bundling.

I'm increasingly convinced all this means we are entering a telco-like
monopoly era for Big Cloud software, starting at the infra layers and steadily
moving up. I'd love a more savvy approach from Elizabeth Warren to be less
'break them up' to more 'these are the anti-competitive bundling violations.'

------
cocktailpeanuts
I am all for unbundling AWS, but I think it's different from Craigslist.

Craigslist is a consumer facing app, which is much easier to "unbundle" than
something like AWS which faces enterprises. Even if some "unbundle wannabe"
starts getting traction, I think Amazon will simply catch up by lowering the
price as much as possible and putting more resources into improving the
developer experience for the corresponding service.

But if anyone has some great insight, please share. I would love to see this
"great unbundling of the AWS" happen.

~~~
zxcmx
A frequently overlooked aspect in enterprise is billing, accounting and
supplier agreement overhead.

In enterprise, Joe developer can often add / use more AWS services and it just
goes on the giant enterprise bill, no questions asked.

If you want to use a third party service, waay more work. Supplier assessment
needs to be done (by the department that does that) looking at security,
company stability, data sovereignty etc. Procurement get involved to negotiate
supplier agreement with the vendor and your project needs a specific budget
line item which might require a trip to accounting. To get signoff and justify
your vendor selection you might also have to do a stupid internal evaluation
thing / bakeoff (even though of course you know the thing you really want)
where you build feature matrix and carefully adjust the rows so your preferred
vendor gets the most ticks.

All this paperwork can take weeks or months.

While a lot of the AWS service offerings are sub-par compared to alternatives,
the technical work of papering over this is usually less risky than dealing
with all the internal departments which will delay your project if you try to
use another vendor.

I think this is a big driver towards bundling being a win for them.

~~~
caseymarquis
Heck, I work at a 20 person company and this is still generally true. No one
is stopping me from using a new service, but using AWS means no new paperwork
and no questions.

Actionable advice on this would be: If you're B2B, have an option for yearly
billing via invoice.

Billing yearly via invoice vs a monthly direct debit means our finance people
deal with payment, and just ask Engineering once a year if they should pay
this weird bill they got. Billing via direct debit means I have to do
paperwork every month. I don't enjoy things like paperwork. I do enjoy things
like building a single customer MVP version of your service on AWS in a couple
hours. You can guess which I'm going to choose if you don't offer yearly
billing.

~~~
fierarul
Seems a bit risky to wait a whole year to collect what's due. I don't believe
I ever heard of yearly invoicing like this.

Of course, if your small company would like to _pre-pay_ towards an
approximation of your early invoice I'm pretty sure some company would be
accommodating.

~~~
caseymarquis
I figured paying for a year up front was implied.

~~~
iakh
Not sure how that could work since most services are based on consumption

~~~
therockspush
Consumption buying is mostly done through the AWS marketplace. Its a good
model for companies to try a new vendor but AWS is going to take a big wet
bite out of the vendors bottom line. Buying licenses directly from vendors is
going to benefit both sides if they have a known demand. You'll generally see
an "all you can eat" license after a certain threshold.

------
dustingetz
In the tech circles I hang out we think of AWS as the next operating system.
In 10-15 years it will be mostly invisible to the application programmer due
to abstractions built on top of it. This is a new frontier for startups.

~~~
qaq
alternatively in 15 years there will be less than 0.01% workloads that a
mainstream 2-way Epyc XXXX Server with 512 physical cores 64TB RAM and
10,000,000 IOPS will not handle so 90% of cloud services will become
meaningless :).

~~~
Terretta
> _90% of cloud services will become meaningless_

As will that Epyc XXXX server, absent a well-peered and hardened services mesh
for it to plug into.

Cloud shouldn’t be used for just someone else’s computer. It’s not the compute
or the storage, it’s the network.

~~~
qaq
Thats cloud ad copy :) >90% of cloud services are there to deal with workloads
that need to span machine boundaries. The only thing you need for that Epyc
XXXX server(s) is decent colo service + cloudflare. Cloud is the new mainframe
and with things being cyclical might repeat it's fate to a degree.

------
awinder
Kind-of alluded to in the article, but if you’re going to unbundle AWS, you’re
going to have to figure out how to get the bandwidth 0-rated. One of amazons
biggest moats (imo) is that they can realize monumental cost savings on
bandwidth while making it very pricy to other service providers. So if you
need to architect bandwidth-hungry or “high scale” applications, going outside
of AWS becomes way too expensive. Even privatelink tacks on bandwidth charges.

You’d have to look at DB providers like Elastic to see how to do this, I
think. But it’s going to involve a very complex and high touch deployment &
support environment. This effectively “prices out” certain classes of
applications as too expensive for value returned. Again I could be looking at
this very wrong, and figuring out how to build profitable unbundled AWS
services would be a great business, but it’s hard to see how to successfully
execute.

~~~
EGreg
I think the Cloud is a result of a gradual move towards centralization of
networked software built by software developers living in countries where DSL
and cable broadband was rolled it early. It was a bit like mainframe
developers back in the day. I remember people discussing “fat clients” vs
“thin clients”.

We forgot what it’s like to have dialup, and the innovative generation of
decentralized software protocols (IRC, Usenet etc) faded into obscurity. Even
Email and the Web are now centralized!

Well the companies won and now we have a feudal kingdom again where we are the
_data-serfs_. We have been well-trained like pavlov’s dogs using notifications
and rewards (likes, comments) to till the _datafields_ and plant fresh crops,
use our social capital to reshare articles etc. And you know that you’re a
serf when that notification lights up on your master’s device and you pause
talking to your girlfriend, wife or child to look at it and maybe act on it.

And of course governments love having a central place they can implement
censorship and spy on everyone.

This has got to stop. It’s not just a technological topology problem, it’s
become a sociological problem and even a problem of democracy and society. THE
SOLUTION IS OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE that will disrupt the landlords of the Web
(Facebook, Google, Amazon etc.) as much as the Web once disrupted the
landlords of the Internet (AOL, MSN, Compuserve).

The first HTTP browsers weren’t better than AOL at anything except one
thing... ANYONE could permissionlessly host a web browser.

What realistic alternatives do we have to Facebook today? Google Docs? That
anyone can easily host and share stuff with friends to easily collaborate? It
would have to have people’s identity and contacts stay consistent across
domains, without owning them and storing them on centralized servers like
Facebook.

I know a few attempts. Diaspora, Solid, Mastodon and Matrix. I also liked
Sandstorm a lot, and OwnCloud was ok. They have not reached mass adoption.
Scuttlebutt is slightly better in that it can interoperate with everything.
The biggest winner in the last few years has been the DID standard, although
it solves one problem only.

There is also an innovative project called MaidSAFE which raised around $10M
and spent 12 years so far building this back-end. I have high hopes for it
once it is released and plan to make Qbix Platform interoperate with it. Check
it out: [https://maidsafe.net/](https://maidsafe.net/)

We will eventually replace the idea of a startup running a database that has
to scale, with an open source startup that releases software that anyone can
pay any hosting company to run and makes money via tokens. That was the dream
of cryptocurrency. The first kind of startup extracts rents via a SAAS model
and forcibly bundles infrastructure management (Slack, Salesforce, Twitter,
Etsy, you name it). The other doesn’t care about cheaper “cloud” costs so
much, because anyone can host it (Wordpress, Magento, Drupal etc.) and the
hosting costs are miniscule for each individual client business. Wordpress and
Magento and Drupal are all valued in the billions, as open source companies.
Maybe people on HN should strive for this rather than “Zero to One”
“competition is for losers” “build a monopoly and extract rents” Peter Thiel
style facebook startups.

Do we need something like this? Or am I just ranting?

 _EDIT: why whenever I post this subject, it is heavily downvoted with no
actual replies or explanations showing me why my position is wrong? Is there a
coordinated effort to downvote this position without further engaging with
it?_

~~~
downrightmike
You are missing the biggest key to everything: The network effect doesn't
happen if people have to install software. FB and twitter et all are so
pervasive because the 90% of the population that is tech illiterate can use it
by just signing up. When you talk about things people can pay any host to run,
you've already lost the argument. Aside from the need to install, now people
also have to pay for hosting, which is a huge negative.

~~~
EGreg
I disagree, because Wordpress powers 34% of all websites in the world. Surely
that is an example of adoption? Showing it’s possible for non techies to own
their own stuff?

What about the Web? Why did people install web servers instead of hosting on
AOL? Because web Browsers existed, and let you consume that data. Couldn’t you
likewise argue that no business would want to mess around with hosting their
own website and a bevy of competing hosting providers would never displace
AOL?

~~~
ecnahc515
> I disagree, because Wordpress powers 34% of all websites in the world.
> Surely that is an example of adoption? Showing it’s possible for non techies
> to own their own stuff?

This is a very bad example since most of them are insecure, out of date, and
not actually run by the non-techies. Most people just contract it out, once to
someone who said he could setup a Wordpress site for cheap, and then they just
pay them or someone else to make any major changes. If it isn't that, it's
another company, or Wordpress itself hosting their instance, again, the
software isn't being run by the "non-techie".

> Why did people install web servers instead of hosting on AOL?

I don't think a lot of people did, again, they paid someone else to host it.
Shared web hosting was, and still is, a very large market.

~~~
EGreg
That’s what I said. There are companies which are in the business of hosting
and they compete unlike the monopoly on hosting Facebook.

People pay them to take care of hosting. But they have a _choice_.

------
jeswin
> As an early stage investor, I’m hard-pressed to name any tectonic shifts
> that have had as much impact on startup formation.

Gross exaggeration. Most startups should worry less about 100% uptime and
scaling than about sales. A dedicated server or two goes a long way, and it
isn't/wasn't really that much harder.

~~~
scarface74
It’s really crazy the myopia I see with posts like this. I’ve worked in the
B2B space mostly in healthcare.. When you get a sale to business where they
are outsourcing a major piece of their functionality to you. You can’t shrug
and not worry about uptime. If you’re building Twitter it doesn’t matter.

~~~
adrianmsmith
Right, but at least where I work (Austria/Germany) if a healthcare provider is
outsourcing their data to you, they won't allow you to use AWS anyway (data
has to be on your servers, in the same country, run by a company owned in that
same country). So even if you are in the situation where you have to worry
about uptime, AWS isn't a solution.

~~~
alexeldeib
AWS and Azure both partner with local companies to meet the data
residency/sovereignty requirements, IDK about healthcare regulation though.

------
jorblumesea
> some of their offerings shift from being best-in-class to being very
> reliable and with a ‘just-ok-but-well-integrated’ user experience.

I would go further and say that some of their experiences are buggy and often
non-functional. Ever tried to search for a service in ECS? The results load
from the backend, and it's a _frontend based search on the backend set_.
Meaning it will say your service does not exist, but you're only searching on
that page * offset.

Then there's the Elastisearch fiasco... [https://spun.io/2019/10/10/aws-
elasticsearch-a-fundamentally...](https://spun.io/2019/10/10/aws-
elasticsearch-a-fundamentally-flawed-offering/)

There are many examples where basic AWS functionality is broken.

------
spicyramen
One missing point is the support for customers and partners. AWS and Azure
provide amazing support experience which emulates and improve what Cisco, HP,
IBM did in the Enterprise space many years before: TAC, Forums,
certifications, partner ecosystem. When you have an issue someone will
actually respond to it. I was interested in Google Cloud but their support was
non-existent, seems to be that their leadership came from the consumer world
where a person is just dumb and their product is always perfect. Specifically
I had an issue with Firebase which I found the answer on Stackoverflow
eventually (app was down for few hours because Google blacklist my environment
by mistake). Since my company relies on high availability, we needed to work
from day 0 with AWS on the design and have a person which would be available
to respond to queries directly. Looks like with new Google CEO that's changing
but just cares about large enterprises . With that in mind AWS and Azure to me
will become a binary option.

------
MuffinFlavored
A 1GB hosted Redis instance is $40/mo on Azure (which I’m told is competitive
with AWS/GCP) yet a “bare-metal” instance with 1GB of memory (in which you can
configure to run Redis yourself) is $5/mo.

Are all hosted infrastructure prices this inflated?

~~~
parhamn
Backups, configuration and failover. Which traditionally meant a db guy or an
ops guy which costs money. I've done it for multiple database technologies and
doing it right is not at all easy or cheap on time.

With that said, Kubernetes _might_ fix this because they have access to more
parts of the system in a generic API. With tech like KubeDB[1] and other
operators[2] we might see these prices coming closer to bare-metal.

[1] [https://kubedb.com/](https://kubedb.com/) [2]
[https://github.com/zalando/postgres-
operator](https://github.com/zalando/postgres-operator)

~~~
MuffinFlavored
Does running Postgres in a container hurt performance?

~~~
ec109685
No.

~~~
ci5er
It used to be unreliable. Is it not now?

~~~
ec109685
I don't think so. We run a bunch of things in k8s / docker and you can achieve
bare metal performance.

------
overgard
A lot of the value of AWS is its integration within itself. (even if it can be
full of rough edges). I think the danger with unbundling is that your
competing project needs to be clearly so much better that people are going to
be willing to go through the hassle of configuring a lot of complicated
networking to work with what they already have, along with separate billing
etc. Not saying it can't be done, but it means the barrier to entry is really
really high. You're not just convincing them your service is better, you're
also convincing them that it's so much better that they should be willing to
take on extra headaches for it.

If I were to compete with aws, I think the area I'd really go after them with
is better kubernetes support. I've yet to see any cloud provider really do it
well, to be honest (which isn't surprising, development on kubernetes moves so
fast and it's so advanced, it's kind of amazing, but that does mean it's
really hard to make it nice outside of a "works for a demo" kind of deal).
Azure and GCP do kubernetes a little bit better, but I think if someone were
to come in and say, like, I don't know, we can do kubernetes on bare metal so
it's much faster than through a VM, and all our services are natively
integrated, that would be a cool story.

The other area I might compete with AWS is in finding niches where
organizations might be hesitant to build an operations department, but they
really need cloud computing. So, for instance, maybe scientific computing or
something like that. If you could make a really useful cloud that can be
administered by someone who barely knows linux, that could be a thing.

------
cj
Hm, I don’t think the craigslist analogy works.

For the same reason it’s difficult to argue there’s opportunity for
“unbundling Facebook” by launching a new image sharing service, building a
news aggregator to compete with newsfeed, building a new messaging app to
compete with Messenger, etc.

The main reason I disagree with the premise is security / compliance
requirements of large customers (a large percentage of the market). The
largest purchasers of AWS-like services prefer to work with as few vendors as
necessary to minimize the number of vendors they need to worry about during
security audits, contracting, etc.

The other obvious problem is, similar to Facebook, AWS has a “network effect”,
in that all AWS services live in the same physical data centers, which results
in potentially competing services suffering from higher latency than “native
AWS” services which might make it harder to compete.

Consumers did not have the same level of loyalty to Craigslist as business
have to AWS.

------
buboard
LAMP was a simple stack. It was performant, and not bloated. That's why 1000
different datacenters could provide the same service. Are there such sub-
bundles in AWS that are cheap enough to run without amazon's scale ? Do people
even need that huge scaling capability or is AWS just convenient?

~~~
Demiurge
I honestly don’t get this myself. I understand AWS for a fast moving startup,
but I’m seeing friends start hobby projects that will never need more than one
$5/m shared dedicated host, and pay $60/m for worse performance.

~~~
kelp
Personally I use DigitalOcean for this sort of thing. But this is why AWS has
Lightsail
[https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/](https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/) to
service that use case and then let people upgrade later to full AWS.

------
chx
[https://twitter.com/br_/status/979442438254166016](https://twitter.com/br_/status/979442438254166016)

> "selling AWS at a loss" is crisp shorthand for a lot of startups' business
> models!

------
jpalomaki
It is usually easier to dump costs to the already hefty AWS bill than push a
completely new service provider through procurement process.

------
ksec
How does the Unbundling work if the Services you are Unbundling runs on AWS?

I dont understand how Craglist and AWS relates? Craglist.... is a .. list or a
market place. AWS is literally like a Fortune 2000 business that is in itself
fully vertically integrated from Hardware to Software and Network.

And then you have economy of scale, and Good enough is enemy of Best. The
barrier of Entry to recreate Craglist is less than a rounding error in
recreating AWS or even any part of its sub component.

I dont have any numbers to back me up on this, so take this with the biggest
grain of salt. I do think there is a Market for provider that sits underneath
AWS or GCP, something like DigitalOcean. AWS or GCP are like Enterprise
product with millions of features being offered to all, while DO is like a
simple to use product that is scaling up its feature offering. And it offers
the essential of Cloud Hosting with Better experience. ( Comparatively
Speaking )

Or Heroku with their own Infrastructure, ( or Cheaper Pricing )

------
bassamtabbara
I made a similar argument [1][2] about tipping the cloud computing market from
vertical to horizontal integration. One important aspect of this
transformation is to maintain the feel of an integrated cloud provider, and
not let the customer/end-user deal with the cost of heterogeneity [3].

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOssXrkNYxM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOssXrkNYxM)

[2] [https://speakerdeck.com/bassam/opening-up-the-cloud-with-
cro...](https://speakerdeck.com/bassam/opening-up-the-cloud-with-crossplane)

[3] [https://crossplane.io](https://crossplane.io)

------
vegardx
There's definitively a market for unbundling services from Amazon, but the
problem is that people forget what the actual killer feature of AWS is; IAM
and Instance Metadata Service.

~~~
aflag
Can you elaborate? After your comment I started thinking I must not really get
IAM.

~~~
Terretta
IAM = dynamic role based access to _and among_ all your things, through
policy-as-code.

If you just Allow: *, you might not care. If you practice least privilege,
this is hard to do another way.

------
0xkalle
Small note: I wouldn't count the serverless framework as cloud agnostic. Yes
you can use the framework for all major clouds but you have to adjust your
project for that. Serverless does not abstract the events, function context or
other service APIs which would be needed if it would be really cloud agnostic
= you can deploy your project to different providers without changes.

------
arikrak
Craigslist didn't try to improve their product which left me opportunity for
other startups than there would have been otherwise.

------
yellow_lead
> There are obvious differences between Craigslist and AWS. The most important
> is that Craigslist (and each of the category spawn) is a marketplace, and so
> has the powerful advantage of network effects.

Isn't AWS also a marketplace?

~~~
elcomet
No. It's only amazon selling services, not everyone. Amazon is a service
provider.

~~~
cthalupa
This is... Kind of true, kind of false.

The AMI marketplace is probably the biggest and most long running example of a
marketplace where others are selling services (software licenses/support), but
privatelink allows people to make a SaaS and not only sell it on a marketplace
on AWS, but also do so with an endpoint in your VPC so you don't have to go
out over the public internet.

I have no idea how well utilized that sort of thing is, so in reality it might
be similar to there not being an option in the first place, and I'm sure in
general Amazon sells far far far more services themselves, but it is possible
for people besides Amazon to sell services on AWS.

------
EGreg
Most profits are obtained by bundling closed-source or costly infrastructure
together with stuff that is cheap but inseparable from it, so you can extract
rents.

That’s why open source unleashes an explosion in innovation.

------
awinter-py
author's focus on datadog & metrics tools as the place to innovate is a smart
way in

in particular, declarative dashboards (from code) and declarative alerts (from
code) would make my life a lot easier

feedback-based / ML alerting thresholds might also hit the spot -- this is an
area where black box isn't safe enough and some innovation is needed

getting any piece of information from datadog or amzn / goog's in-house
dashboards is like pulling teeth -- they're _so_ slow and clunky

------
dana321
AWS is expensive for what it is. I really don't understand the hype machine
around what they provide, since openstack has been around for a few years.

------
jakozaur
1\. AWS got business advantage of buying 100+ services at once, without going
through procurement, invoicing, GDPR Data Processing Agreements, on/off
boarding, same support, good security and uptime, credibility of keeping
backward compatibility for decades etc.

There should be open platform that would eliminate that advantage.

2\. EC2 and S3 when used properly would be harder to beat. You can get
reserved discounts, spot, elasticity... Moving them would require paying for
bandwidth which easily makes playing field uneven.

3\. The higher layer of services CloudWatch, ElasticSearch, Cognito got much
higher margins, yet lacking functionality and quality. Much easier targets for
disruption.

------
hartror
I've not come across the term JAMstack before, why doesn't this make sense for
using with AWS as the author suggests?

~~~
unraveller
AWS is best for big projects with lots of data processing in different ways
that need scale, that's what all the features are for. JAMstack usually
implies a simple text API which you could use on AWS AppSync for example but
there are much simpler horizontal alternatives since a tiny websocket server
can handle many 100,000s of users.

------
noway421
another point: you don't pay for services you don't use, so AWS is not
"bundled" to begin with. you get to pick and choose. in such a model, i don't
see any benefit in fragmentation tbh.

