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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a Zapier killer, makes sense.

"Killer" - No.

90% of the market for Zapier is people who have no technical knowledge. Those people won't be jumping on AWS any time soon.

Obviously pulling the 90% out of my ass, but I'm heavy Zapier user for my e-commerce business. I have (Or had - Haven't renewed as e-com has replaced my DevOps income) multiple AWS certs and I'd still much prefer Zapier over this. Especially when you can run custom code on Zapier for more complex cases anyway.

Can I ask what sort of tasks you have setup for your e-commerce business?

- If a new voicemail comes in, see if it's an existing customer and send them an email we'll be in touch if we do - Create new ZenDesk users for any Shopify customer - Send emails when positive product reviews come in asking if they would mind sending a Facebook review - If a negative product review comes in, ask what we can do to make things better - New order comes in: Will create draft emails to all necessary vendors I need to contact, pre-filled with shipping details. - New order comes in: Separate order cost by vendor, grab taxes, grab shipping, grab discounts, put it all in an airtable database and create invoicing and purchase order records to attach it to. - Slack notifications - Pull PDFs from Google drive, parse with DocParser, upload into Xero accounting.

I'm sure there's way more I can do as well. I have to find the balance between automating and just telling an employee to do it But automation leads to less mistakes

Interesting that Amazon seems to rarely acquire competitors. Instead they (slowly) begin to meet their use cases one by one.

It seems that Amazon have quite strong internal standards for services that they're going to roll out, for example all critical services are required to use DynamoDB, which would make it difficult to integrate a competitor into their wider ecosystem of AWS services. They've also got a vast pool of people to draw from around the company which allows them to implement new functionality on top of existing tools they've already built, rather than having to do everything from the ground up.

I’m not so sure about that - Zapier has a number of use cases that are completely unrelated to AWS.

This is just Amazon’s first move. They definitely have most of Zapier’s use cases on their roadmap at this point.

I suspect that by AWS going first here, they can easily go for more integrations whilst also eating some of the Zapier's competitors lunch.

This depends on price and by that time its possible that Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure will start jumping in on the integrations market too, further squeezing the likes of some enterprise-only integrations such as Tray.io which still has less integrations than Zapier in general.

It's still too early to tell, but we'll see how fast Amazon adds support for more API integrations or if GCP and Azure will join in and do the same.

Amazon seem to have a disadvantage here though. This kind of tool is aimed at non-developers who want to glue stuff together. With Zapier, they register an account and get stuck in – straightforward. With AWS, they register an account and are instantly overwhelmed with a million different things. AWS is too big and unfocused for the target market. I've seen developers hit a wall once they get on board AWS because it's just too much to deal with. You think the AWS dashboard is any friendlier to non-developers?

It is targeting a very different use case than apps like Zapier and IFTTT.

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