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Comment by senderista | Hacker News Reader

I was there for the launch of a major AWS service where they had an entire separate team working on the next iteration since well before launch (because the initial design wasn’t even intended to be sustainable). They are happy to incur technical risk (and in this case, to eat major losses in hardware costs) in order to be first to market.

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We used MongoDB in my last job and I just want to say that I would have given up management of that beast in a heartbeat. We didn't stress MongoDB nearly enough to warrant all the effort required to construct it, monitor it, back it up, etc. Even if the performance was crappy, I would have lobbied hard to change to DocumentDB ASAP.

While I don't love MongoDB, I don't find it to be especially difficult to run. I'm running ~200 instances of MongoDB with a small team and it consumes very little of my attention.

ElasticSearch on the other hand...

Why is Elastic so difficult to run for you?

I'm sure they are, so they a pass those lovely negative externalities onto the customer because they know it's in demand and only they provide that service.

If only they had a competitor that could launch the same products a few months later but offered higher reliability off the bat, that could eventually force Amazon to improve their reliability or risk losing customers long term.

Being first to market doesn't ensure eventual market dominance. Sure, it could give you important feedback. But if your product is subpar, the feedback will have a ton of noise and possibly be useless. Plus it's not worth creating negative externalities and earning the reputation.

> If only they had a competitor that could launch the same products a few months later but offered higher reliability off the bat

Doesn't Azure Cosmos DB do this? From https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/introductio...

> You can elastically scale throughput and storage, and take advantage of fast, single-digit-millisecond data access using your favorite API among SQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Tables, or Gremlin.

Haven't used it though, so would welcome some real world experience.

For how many customers do all of AWS flaws combined represent more than 2% of their production outages? I think it’s a very small number.

You think AWS has a reliability problem for their database products? That's news to me. AWS often launches products with limited features, but security, durability and reliability tend to be the standard.

Reliability is the trickiest of the three because it requires the customer to architect their solution with multi-AZ support in mind, but AWS always provides the foundation for that architecture.

Could they, and should they provide more features and a better developer experience around building fault tolerant solutions? Absolutely! But I certainly don't think they have a bad reputation for reliability.

From my perspective, performance and scaling issues are most likely to occur.

> If only they had a competitor that could launch the same products a few months later but offered higher reliability off the bat, that could eventually force Amazon to improve their reliability or risk losing customers long term.

They have, it's Azure. I'm even a little bit scared because no one here is mentioning CosmosDB... It seems to me that most of the community only knows aws products.

Well, they are second to market this time around, Cosmos has had mongo api compatibility for a long time.

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