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Comment by raiyu | Hacker News Reader

"Business folks" :)

But all kidding aside, the numbers just don't make sense. AWS is doing $30B in revenue and has tens of thousands of engineers.

Google which many can argue has some of the best engineering on the planet is going after AWS investing billions in datacenters and again using thousands of engineers.

So to think that DigitalOcean with a $300MM debt line and 250+ people in engineering is going to go after AWS just doesn't add up.

Certainly when you have 500+ people in a company everyone has different opinions and view points on where a company should be headed, or who it is competing with and so forth, but for me the priority has always been clear. Focus on the SMBs, and developer teams, that need the flexibility that AWS offers without the complexity because you aren't managing a $10MM hosting budget.

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I don’t necessarily disagree with you, not sure I’d place a bet on DO taking on AWS realistically, but:

> So to think that DigitalOcean with a $300MM debt line and 250+ people in engineering is going to go after AWS just doesn't add up.

Lots of Money + Lots of People =/= Guaranteed Success

It’s more a matter of taking on the market from a slightly different angle.

One viable path I see is for DO to ramp up their enterprise appeal by offering services on par with AWS, while cutting down the operational complexity of managing AWS services (using AWS = incredibly high overhead with configuration and everything else).

> Lots of Money + Lots of People =/= Guaranteed Success

I'll agree on that.

I won't agree with the rest though, I don't think DO can compete in an enterprise level.

Actually in the longrun I don't see DO ever being viable. AWS and google are going to become simpler as the time passes and they are going to take over that margin that is left on services like DO, ovh etc. I think the only viable business plan for them right now would be to focus on their simplicity and continue building on it hoping they will get bought out by the big players. Obviously thats not good for us -> amazon and google owning everything on the web but unless there is some crazy law that limits them from doing so, they are going to do it.

There are still MANY old style ISPs playing in the DO-like space. Hosting is HUGE. Plenty of room for many DO like players at .1-1% marketshare.

Google and AWS are NOT going to become simpler, to the contrary, that would defeat their entire proposition. To eliminate the traditional enterprise data center entirely, build sufficient lock-in moats, and then continue to innovate around costs and value requires tons of bespoke capabilities and complexities.

> AWS and google are going to become simpler as the time passes

Really? I see them becoming more complex as they add more services.

I agree I don't see AWS and Google becoming simpler, but instead becoming more complex. They are also catering to workloads that are completely different and they really need to have every single possible knob and dial and configuration possible to satisfy these enterprise customers.

Doing what they do is complex and takes a certain skill set, but also doing simplicity right is it's own skill set.

I would say that I would be more worried in the past when AWS was more of a single player, but now that Google and Azure are firmly in the picture, AWS has some real competition in their core market which takes their focus away from us which is great.

> One viable path I see is for DO to ramp up their enterprise appeal by offering services on par with AWS, while cutting down the operational complexity of managing AWS services (using AWS = incredibly high overhead with configuration and everything else).

Absolutely. Getting into AWS, etc can be overwhelming. Getting into DO is incredibly easy.

ye I agree, it feels impossible to penetrate that market unless you have many billions and the actual engineering knowledge behind it.

I think DO is good for the small/average player that doesn't wanna invest time into having his team learning the AWS quirks because his business isn't in heavy need of it.

If AWS or even google ever goes after the small/average user by creating an easier to understand/navigate service for the user that doesn't need all that overhead and time investment of that bizarre learning curve just to setup a simple application, then its just gonna kill DO and other services like that out there.

Two words: "egress cost".

Currently both AWS and GCE cost is multiple times more per gigabyte served, compared to DO. E.g. AWS S3 is $0.09 per gigabyte served, while Do Spaces is about $0.01.

For certain businesses, traffic is a major cost, and paying many tomes as much for it could make them unprofitable.

So no, a cloud provider of the DO class must be long-term viable, just in a different niche.

>If AWS or even google ever goes after the small/average user by creating an easier to understand/navigate service for the user that doesn't need all that overhead and time investment of that bizarre learning curve just to setup a simple application, then its just gonna kill DO and other services like that out there.

Lightsail doesn't seem to have killed off DO: https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/

I disagree, you can't just tack on simplicity to an incredibly complex product. Elastic Beanstalk is not in the same class as Heroku (despite both running on AWS). When you look at AWS the strength is in breadth and loose coupling. This allows internal teams to push a massive set of products forward in parallel, but the tradeoff is that the seams show everywhere, which directly works against having a simple and cohesive product experience. Theoretically it is possible, but I think you'd need to brand it outside AWS and probably dedicate way more headcount than a beancounter would deem reasonable to compete with DO, and even then I'm not sure AWS or Google are structurally capable of producing such a thing.

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