Then Amazon enters your business space in direct competition to you. Through your business with AWS you are now funding a large, fierce, and direct competitor.
Anyone else think of this, or am I just being paranoid?
I believe this is inaccurate, Netflix was streaming from AWS in their early years IIRC.
The history is that mainly they used well-known CDNs for streaming, followed by their OpenConnect CDN network now. AWS has always been used for metadata.
https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
I'm not aware of them streaming from AWS, though it's possible a development group there did a test or something temporarily.
Can someone familiar with Netflix speak to this?
It makes sense that they'll continue to run stuff in AWS due to their existing footprint, but are they mandated to build new stuff outside the cloud? And if so, why?
https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-the-net...
They've never used AWS for their CDN.
The catalog of successful movies is available publicly anyway :-)
You are doing a large part of the market research for your competitors by using cloud services and platforms. You just pray they are good actors and ethical.
Their entire business model at this point seems to charge other business for the right to figure out what a good business for them to get into it.
Safeway, Fred Meyer, Costco, you name it there is a Select or some other generic offering of their competitor’s goods.
Amazon Basics is just like the grocery store brands that have become popular. They're basically rebranded products by a different company at a cheaper price with some level of quality endorsed by the retailer (Amazon, Costco, Kroger/Publix grocery stores, etc)
Like if I was to go to a brick and mortar store and there was a 10% chance that the brand name cereal I bought could be counterfeit but a 0% chance if I bought the store brand.
Then Amazon comes up with Amazon Basics brand through which you only get genuine products.
And guess what is reinforced in users mind? That Amazon Basics is only true source of legit stuff rest all businesses selling on Amazon are fraudsters.
Who profits from allowing fake on their store? Amazon.
Or they contract with you to sell a private label version of your own product.
For example, Ergotron makes a very nice quality monitor arm:
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00358RIRC/
Amazon Basics has a monitor arm that looks just like the Ergotron, except it's all black instead of silver and black.
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00MIBN16O/
I have a couple of the Amazon arms. The reason they look the same is because they are made by Ergotron. It says so right on the box:
Ship From: Ergotron Inc - Private Brands - US
All under the implied threat that if you don't partner with them, they will go to a competitor and push that product before yours.
I am sure there are hundreds of companies that were asking AWS to offer a fully managed Kafka service. I asked for it many times to my account manager when they where pitching Kinesis.
[1] https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/news/technology/meas...
This is also an issue at my current company, and I think a significant driver of the "cloud agnostic" push.
More concerning would probably be the possibility that your AWS service would be suspended or otherwise purposefully disrupted.
>> What is the relevance of funding your competitor?
> That's not an argument.
Sure it is. It's a great argument. Do you somehow think Amazon is limiting itself to copying businesses on the AWS platform only? No: they'll copy any successful business anywhere.
Unless your business is Netflix, you, by yourself, are not contributing enough to their bottom line to boost their efforts to compete with you. And guess what: Netflix doesn't believe that the money they're paying AWS is enough to hurt their competitiveness with Prime Video. The 10 VMs your company is going to run aren't going to matter.
You can certainly object to Amazon business practices and take a principled stand against doing AWS business with them, but that's something you would presumably do whether or not they were competing with you.
It is like these FBA sellers are paying Amazon, then giving valuable data to them and helping Amazon put them out of business. It is just a shitty situation
>Through your business with AWS you are now funding a large, fierce, and direct competitor.
No one here is talking about FBA's or the Amazon marketplace; they're talking about using AWS and having Amazon infiltrate your product space down the road.
That said, you are funding a fierce competitor, even if your AWS bill is just 10 bucks a month...
Using AWS to build your back end before finding out that Amazon is now going to enter your market is hardly the same thing. Your handful of VMs make exactly zero difference. AWS or no, Amazon was going to eat your lunch.
So they'll get even more data on the marketing side.
Your business is not going to make any difference in Amazon's financial situation, but if you're saving money by using AWS's services, why would you spend even more money by porting to Azure or GCP?
So if the savings in time to market/cost/whatever truly justified moving to AWS, does it matter that Amazon comes to town?
In other words, consider: if you did the analysis and saw the potential benefit but decided not to move to AWS due to the risk of feeding the beast, what happens when Amazon still enters your product space? You’re still gonna have to fight them, but you just gave up months or years of cost savings or product features or whatever other positive you identified that could’ve improved your position in the market.
other than making you feel bad, is there any practical downside to this?
And more directly to your point, Amazon presumably evaluates each market they enter separately. They have a big enough war chest to run at a loss forever, but they won’t do so because it’s not good business