There are no guarantees that they will provide the best complements to their own product, but the common sense is that they will. From a marketing perspective, I think it makes complete sense, especially when selling to enterprise customers.
The best complement for server side software is often being able to do it reliably, globally, redundantly, managed, on demand, and cheaply. The only three companies that can do that reliably as far as most customers are concerned are Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
The flip side of that which eventually comes home to roost though is that it means the two are easily confused . If I'm a customer and I can download X or buy X from you, and the two are virtually identical, you better have a damn good story as to what your value proposition over and above the project is.
Red Hat actually arguably only just got themselves out of this. Originally there was just Red Hat Linux, regardless of whether you paid them a cent. The split into Fedora (Core) - the free distribution - and RHEL - the enterprise distribution with paid support subscriptions - is a not insignificant part of why the company still exists today. This transition was not without controversy, and arguably created the space into which Canonical and Ubuntu emerged, but it was a necessary step to disambiguate the project and the thing people actually pay for with its own value prop and messaging around it.
It's somewhat surprising that so many of these companies proclaim they want to be the next Red Hat, but ignore the prior art for how that came to be.
Are you posting from the future? Because it isn't after that case yet; Google plans to appeal (given that they filed for an extension to the 25th of this month) the latest Federal Circuit decision to the US Supreme Court and, if that doesn't succeed and end the case in Google’s favor, the next step would be a third trial in the District Court, followed—however that turns out—by another appeal by one side or the other to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, possibly another petition for en banc rehearing after that appeal, and potentially another appeal to the Supreme Court.
Google did the same thing with Java. It’s up in the air how that will turn out.
Probably true for the average punter, but we shouldn’t overlook the other players, like Alibaba, DigitalOcean, IBM, Vultr, Oracle, Linode and more.
A serious CTO whose neck is on the line is not going to go with a small player.
To paraphrase an old saying.
“No one ever got fired for buying AWS”
For an MS shop, the same could be said for Azure.
But going with AWS because ‘no-one ever got fired’ for it, or picking Azure because you play squash with a guy from Microsoft’s sales team is just lazy. Not that I’m saying it doesn’t happen.
Forbes and Gartner might ignore the other players, doesn’t mean we can’t be better informed.
If someone had bought a mainframe IBM system in 1980 to run their COBOL system over their competitor, 40 years later, they could still buy a compatible system from IBM. It’s competitors - not so much.
On the other hand, idealism has its place, but when things hit the fan because of your choice of vendors, it’s a lot easier to justify a buying decision by saying the vendor was in the second quadrant of Gartner’s Magic Square.
sometimes it's okay though.
but AWS monoculture is not a bright future.
Elastic Cache - hosted Redis and Memcached
Aurora - compatible with MySQL and Postgres
RDS - hosted versions of Mysql, MariaDB, Sql Server, and Oracle.
Redshift - yes it uses a proprietary/columnar store engine but it is compatible with Postgres.
Etc.
But the bigger point is that you’re always locked into your infrastructure, do you think your CTO is going to move from their million dollar Oracle infrastructure because you used the Repository Pattern?
I'm not advocating simply ignoring AWS's strengths because let's say Lambda/EBS/ELB/etc. is proprietary, but this is a very real, very simple risk. As AWS can, it will raise prices.
And sure, maybe it doesn't matter because you can always just fall back to using whatever you use on simple VMs, and AWS will always have some competition in the simple VM hosting space and VM prices will therefore will be low.
However, I'm on the opinion that institutional inertia will "kick in" (to use a rather bad figure of speech for something that is about as agile as a drum of molasses) and will simply let AWS rent-seek.
Congratulations, you now have the worse of all worlds. You’re spending more than baremetal, you’re spending just as much on maintenance and management instead of letting someone else do the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” and your developers are moving slower than they would have if they took advantage of your cloud vendors offerings.
Win????
Or, well, you can, but then don't forget to set your billing limit to infinity as well. Because AWS wants to make money.
Anyway, I'm not saying RDS/Aurora/etc. is bad, but eventually the heavy lifting will be available for anyone ( https://github.com/beekhof/rss-operator and similar projects ), and it's not like AWS likes to pay when they don't perform according to their SLA.
While you can’t fire all of your ops you can reduce the headcount by a combination of managed services/servers, automation, outsourcing to managed service providers, and an auto healing fault tolerant infrastructure