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In 5 years will AWS still have 25% operating margins?

Jeff Bezos' quote "Your margin is my opportunity" might come back to haunt their AWS Business.

I suspect yes. AWS seems to be pushing hard towards more managed application services (things like lambda) built on top of their core AWS services like EC2 and S3, and they can maintain their margin on those services even if competition drives down the prices on EC2.

Those services are incredibly proprietary to AWS. I really question why companies would want to tie themselves to a single cloud provider.

Because technology evolves too quickly to do cross-platform, cross-cloud solution and the demand for getting work done now is more demanding than ever. Tried to do it for two cloud platforms + on-premise, you will literally want to kill yourself for supporting your code three-way. Do it right once for one platform, and then next step. AWS isn't going away any time soon. But seriously, you don't just click buttons all day to spin up your infrastructure. Lock in with GCP is like lock in with AWS or herkuo, or App Engine, their APIs belongs to them, you built around kubernetes, and you lock yourself into their BigTable Query. Whatever your SRE/Infra/DevOps team are building now for your company's infrastructure automation is totally locked down for one kind of solution.

Why not Kubernetes?

It run's on all major cloud platforms, VM environments and bare metal. Supported by every major player except Amazon (for obvious reasons, why would they want to support something that makes it easy to migrate away from them?)

Kubernetes is supported on AWS by various companies in the industry, including my own, Kismatic (the enterprise Kubernetes company). We have been pushing for the team at ECS to adopt K8S as a standard framework on which to run containerized workloads. As Kubernetes gets adopted as a container cluster management standard for orchestrating and running microservice-oriented apps, all the cloud providers will need to support it based on customer demand, in the same way they are all supporting Docker due to the demand.

You can, but is Google going to make their environment so compatible with other cloud platform? Actually, how many major players do we have in this space, capable of delivering a true cloud environment?

AWS, Microsoft, and Google.

When AWS first started, it was EC2 and S3, so the model was about VM without worrying the bare metal. But as the platform continues to grow to challenge its competitors, the platform will begin to add more services which are only available and are proprietary to the its own platform.

> is Google going to make their environment so compatible with other cloud platform?

Yes. Google's strategy with Kubernetes is to commoditize the cloud - making them all functionally interchangeable. Write to Kubernetes, and your app runs on AWS, GCE, Azure, etc...

They are betting that they can deliver raw CPU cycles, network bandwidth, lower latency etc. - better/faster/cheaper than their competitors.

I am not familiar with GCE so I can be absolutely wrong, but my way of thinking is that any time anyone says something can run the open source version anywhere, true, but when it comes to offering a paid service, making some technology native to the platform, means there can be difference such as customized APIs or customized features which may never get backport into the community/open source version.

That is very clearly not how they are working with Kubernetes. They are doing it entirely in the open and even recently hired one of their huge community contributors (shoutout to Kelsey Hightower) to the team. If they were doing an "open core" version, my money would be on Kelsey speaking out against it. Besides, given their goal of making the cloud a commodity, they can't do what you say.

Do you write everything cross operating system or cross database engine or cross language runtime or cross chipset architecture?

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