Monetize Your APIs in AWS Marketplace Using API Gateway

I can see how this market has a BS feel to it (and have noticed this too lately), but at least the general concept of "API" leaves a lot of room for interpretation... perhaps much more functionality can be exposed via an API on such a marketplace than could ever be offered by an "app", etc.

Thanks, corrected

I'd say that ipinfo.io sells data, just through an API. Building a data set is expensive and takes time.

Pure API plays are harder, I think.

Here is the Azure API management link: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/api-management/

Amazon Machine Instance [1]. Its the name Amazon uses for the virtual machine image running on AWS.

1: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/AMIs.html

That's for their employees to worry about. They're not helpless - they're software developers with high demand.

Perhaps it suggests that the rumors of horrible work culture have been greatly exaggerated.

And I am a bad human being for caring more about the features than their work culture?

until you hit "back"

>What lessons can this teach to the rest of us, who don't have the infrastructure or user-base to do the kind of testing that they do?

Probably a lot. I've worked with embarrassingly bad looking websites that were making millions of dollars in revenue, only to see it drop off a cliff after a "modern" redesign. The truth is that the general public sees a much different thing as they browse the web than we do. Things like legibility, simplicity, and speed are far more important than advanced features.

I think Amazon.com is heavily tested, not so sure about AWS. I'm happy that it's Web 1.0 (i.e. fast), but it often seems as new functions were just added to existing design. Some pages might need reorganization/redesign to make them a bit less complicated to use.

The problem is that people often associate a redesign with switching to SPA. Which I really hope they won't do.

It is extensively tested except that the individual parts are owned by different units that need to optimize their profitability.

So instead of having an overall good looking site you have tiny billboards screaming at you to buy.

I use Amazon all the time. I just never look at their home page much and just look at search results.

I think you're falling into the hole of thinking the web interface is the business. I don't shop at Amazon because I like their website, I do it because Prime allows me reliable free 2-day shipping, because camelcamelcamel provides an accurate price history, because I believe in the customer service, and because I can usually find what I'm looking for.

Now they opened a warehouse nearby I can order something in the morning and have it in the afternoon.

Amazon is a logistics company with a web frontend, that frontend isn't nearly the most important part of their business. Their recommendations are awful, their site is clunky and difficult (try to, say, price compare the per-battery price on CR123A batteries for a frustrating afternoon) and doesn't do classes or categories well at all.

The point I'm trying to make is they've got a lot going for them that isn't their website and most of that is why they're popular.

„...because it has high information density...“ +1!! If you look at the Sellercentral backend (for sellers on Amazon) it is breathtaking what kind of Analytics, inventory reports, etc you can generate.

Would love to have this kind of level of information in an external (own) ecommerce-shop/system.

Minimalist design is not even remotely about fashion. At least not as applied to UX and conversion flow. It's about intuition vs cognition. Amazon is blind to how extraordinarily bad their UI is probably because they are putting too much value into A/B testing and/or leadership has a belief that "everything at once" is some how more helpful to users then a directed flow.

A/B testing is a very useful tool for a very constrained problem of comparing two or more alternatives of the same thing. It cannot tell you which overall UX approach is more effective. Good minimalist design is about creating user flow which often consists of multiple simple steps. Each step avoiding cognitive overload by maintaining a context and limiting the current scope.

Actually these multiple steps happen on complex pages too. The difference is that on complex pages the user gets no help from the UX to accomplish their goal. It needn't be fashionable, it needs to be functional not in the theoretical sense, but in the actual sense accounting for real user behavior.

Amazon and people who mistakenly believe that "information density" is necessarily good, often not true, and that a "lot of words" == "information density" which is also often not true fail to realize that following a link or scrolling a pages is actually less difficult then visually searching a cluttered information scape.

Even users who do not become frustrated by the UI will 'pre-filter' it once they figure out how to do the one thing they want. This has the effect of making most of the interface invisible to then from that point on. It's like driving to work, they will tune out all the visual noise around them after the first few trips. So at best the information density has no value because it is ignored, and at worst, it's adding a heavy friction to conversion.

It's bad, pre design 101 bad. Amazon only gets away with it because they already won the market long ago.

> buying groceries (albeit no one really has a great interface for that).

VR Grocery Store please. Let me walk around the store in my home and let me browse the grocery aisles. Make the VR experience 'live' by using the in-store security cameras to construct the VR environment and in-store data like real-time inventory counts.

I believe the parent poster was saying the AWS ui is what looks dated.

No one company has to.

Much of their features come out from requests of existing customers; they know that ~someone~ cares about it, because someone who is already giving them money has asked for it. As they add those, other people will also use it, as needed. They expand the feature set for anyone evaluating them, as well as help lock in existing customers.

From a load perspective, if the request pattern is even, 225 million req/month are only about 85 req/s (assuming ~730hrs/mo). Any $5/mo VPS running even a very heavy and suboptimal web framework can handle that.

It's likely more spikey than that (i.e., peak/off-peak times), but certain server-to-server loads have a very consistent load pattern. (For example, at Userify[1] - SSH key management -- servers check for updates every 90 seconds or so or 10 seconds for premium plans or self hosted, so the load pattern is literally a flat line.. extremely predictable. We'll probably switch over clients that can handle it to websockets and maybe hashed etags and cut that load pattern into oblivion, but for now it works and is simple/auditable code/extremely reliable, which is a very important factor in our case.)

To GP's point, spiraling costs are definitely a factor with most of Amazon's services such as DynamoDB and especially Lambda... they are sometimes an effective use of devtime, especially in the beginning of a project (and when dealing with a mature platform like DynamoDB and maybe not so much Lambda), but you have to carefully consider the cost factor as you scale. For example, Lambda is often literally several orders of magnitude[2] more expensive than an equivalent ELB. (i.e., it can be more than 100x more expensive.. for small scale or maintenance tasks, that may not matter.. for a heavy/core service, it definitely matters!) So, as they taught us in AWS SA, design for cost: use the more advanced services when it makes sense, but optimize across all axes, not just devtime.

TL;DR: most cheap cloud instances can do 85req/s.

1. https://userify.com

2. https://twitter.com/JamiesonBecker/status/802185522139582464

It used to run in PHP/redis but when the load got too high I rewrote the server in GO. No database needed as the server downloads and loads the files in memory.

Popular does not neccesarily mean profitable though. If you can easily know whats profitable in the landscape, thats killer.

They could, but wouldn't have the advantage of all the handy metadata this service provides to do it accurately, at scale.

And why wouldn't they? It clearly hasn't stopped sellers. Amazon has them do all the market research on their dime. Amazon then gets all the data to decide what to launch next to improve their margins, and they get paid for the privilege.

I can't say I blame them, but I can't say it does much for my trust in them either.

So did he just invest to get info to decide whether to launch a competing product?

Also sending text messages, xml-whois api, etc...

Assuming an AWS hosted service would save both the buyer and seller the egress charges, that's probably the killer use case. Captive gardens like to grow.