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Comment by ccccccccccccc | Hacker News Reader

I understand how great this is, but does anyone else get a little upset when GCP, AWS, and Azure are able to buy their way into a market and are pretty much guaranteed to hurt the small players in the infra tooling market?

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I take it as a sign that the value bar keeps getting raised for small players to exist. CI is becoming so commodity that it doesn't really matter if you get it from Google or Codeship. If a slow-moving corporate machine can replicate what you do...maybe you need to move faster.

Understandable. I suppose as time goes on any product is going to be centralized among a handful of major players.

> does anyone else get a little upset when GCP, AWS, and Azure are able to buy their way into a market

There's benefits to smaller, hungrier teams building things, but unless they have paying customers on day one they're also buying their way into the market one way or another...

Yes. I have no skin in this game personally but I feel bad when Google or one of the other behemoth's of tech decide to offer a service that small players are already thriving in. Google can compete with a scale of development that can easily drive the small guys out of business. What's worse is that they then get bored with the product at some point, or a pointy haired boss looks sadly at a revenue chart and the thing suddenly disappears with no recourse and the small players are gone.

I understand this, my company is currently dealing with a similar situation. We have a small vendor that hosts things, but I am pushing to drop them for Azure because it offers so many more features and tools that the vendor just can't match. It's kind of an acquisition thing, we acquired a company that deals with this vendor, we were already using Azure. It's much harder to go off the cloud than to go on it, imo. You just lose so many great features when you move off of it. It's sad, but at the same time it's becoming impossible for smaller people to compete in a cloud world. I don't think that's going to change. My biggest fear is that once all the small players are killed off Google, Microsoft and AWS will agree in some back room to not compete on price to protect their margins. I have a feeling that something like that is merely a decade away, if not less.

this is the reason companies build platforms. If you own the platform, you get a big advantage over third-parties building tools on your platforms. they aren't buying their way into the market with money, they're buying their way into the market with years and years of work building the platform. I don't think it's anything to get upset about.

Also, the big cloud platforms aren't shy about acquiring smaller players, and that's an exit that a lot of the people building tools for cloud platforms are looking for. I think it's safe to say that without GCP, AWS, and Azure there'd be a lot fewer companies building CI tools.

As much as big players move into green pastures - so do open source projects. It's more about low-hanging fruit than anything else.

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