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Comment by bigiain | Hacker News Reader

I dunno.

From the angle I'm looking, AWS wants to sell Redis/Mongo/Elasticsearch because that's what the devs are using. The devs are using it because it solves one of their problems well (or, less charitably, because its a "standard part" of new-framework-de-jour).

I can't think of any piece of software that came out of a cloud provider into a place of being "the essential hot new dev framework".

I don't deny for a moment that Amazon/Google/Microsoft write a lot of software, but I haven't got an example I can point at of that moving out of their own ecosystem into the broader development community.

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Well I think cloud providers look at software offerings differently. To them, software is a managed distributed system that works at scale and probably doesn't make very much sense if there's only a single user. It's hard for a managed service like that to be distributed as a single codebase or binary in the way that redis can. But they still pump out technologies that have high dev adoption.

Things like Lambda, S3, Kinesis have become huge in the dev world in one form or another - Lambda as the serverless concept, S3 as the standard API interface, Kinesis as Kafka (not implying causation or copying, just that AWS independently developed a technology very similar to something that became huge in the dev world).

Not too sure about Microsoft.

Google has invented so many technologies that have shaped development that it would be exhausting to list. MapReduce, AngularJS, Kubernetes and TensorFlow each transformed the development world and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Yeah - Google are definitely different to Amazon, but I'm not sure the Google Cloud part of Google can take credit for all the cool software Google release.

And I'll give Amazon credit for Lambda and Kinesis, but at least in my head, S3 is just ludicrous-scale BerekleyDB (or any of the persist-to-disk forks of memcached including the one I wrote back when it was still written in Perl).

The cloud providers have enough resources to provide APIs that are compatible with the popular ones. They won't be selling you Mongo but a Mongo-compatible replacement built in house.

Yeah - but they need Mongo (or whatever) to a) exist, and b) be widely enough used to make it worth their while.

Amazon isn't in the business of creating and promoting new software to developers. Not in the way Mongo/Redis/Elastic are.

"Popular things" have to come from somewhere, and my optimistic side kinda hopes that _maybe_ these new "OSS unless you're a cloud provider" licenses will be a way to fund development of software too big and complex and ambitious that it won't ever get started as a "scratch your itch" project. I dunno if that'll pan out. But I'm glad someone is trying.

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