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Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

My guess is simply, they don't want to fund their own competitors. Microsoft is a direct competitor already (so is Google,) and who knows what Amazon will do. That really only leaves IBM and Oracle. I've always been baffled when someone hosts on their competitors' platform. Like Netflix hosting on AWS, and Grocery Stores hosting on AWS. Microsoft & Google rarely have that problem (except on this one.)

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I’ve been impressed by what I’ve heard about Walmart. They apparently won’t even use a SaaS tool if it’s hosted on Amazon.

Wow. That’s news to me. Walmart is so calculated.

It's just smart business.

Your random SaaS company is often a big shitshow. I've had more than one vendor Sales Engineer show me live customer data in response to performance or other questions. Startups and smaller SaaS companies in particular often demonstrate amazing levels of cluelessness.

I had that happen today.

We had an e-com SaaS company give us "sample product data" to help one our customers who was onboarding to their platform and was trying to figure out how to set up their product records and taxonomies, and the data turned out to be poorly anonymized real production data from one of our client's competitors who was also on the same SaaS platform.

In my last job we used Basecamp for project management and then we started doing work for Walmart. They flat out said if you want to use a SaaS tool then they have to sign a liability agreement in case any trade secrets were leaked. Needless to say they said no as did everyone else. Which forced us into self hosting a ton of stuff.

Walmart uses a few big SaaS providers it’s weird they singled out Basecamp and self hosting. I built a couple integrations to Walmart’s SaaS products. We used off the self SaaS products hosted in the clouds too.

This was a few years ago right when Walmart Labs was taking off so their attitude probably changed some.

That makes sense. Even if private information isn't leaked, Amazon would still know things about usage and billing.

I worked at walmart labs for 3 years and that is correct. We had one, on premise, service that phoned home for license information to an AWS address and our request to whitelist the ip address had to go up to the CTO.

That’s changed hasn’t it? I remember going to a Walmart labs talk 5 years ago where they were all in on aws.

No. I don't think so. They really don't like AWS. It's all openstack/azure/gcp/vmware depending on the use case.

You can’t use AWS if you sell large amounts of stuff through Walmart either. One of my former clients demanded that we use Azure because of this.

You can use AWS, you just can't store any WalMart data there .. which is usually 30-90% of your data for your typical CPG.

Depending on how you define “store”, that basically means no AWS. This particular client understood this to mean no EC2, since data remains on disk, which cuts out the vast majority of the AWS offerings.

For this client the only AWS product we were cleared to use was Lambda, and only for integrating Alexis into the product.

I used to work for a company that made POS and Self Checkouts. Walmart was a big customer and we had to make sure the stack didn’t have any AWS. Same with Target.

That's pretty weird. AWS and Amazon's shop are two different companies. If they are afraid of leaking data, that two-hop scenario seems to be less of a problem than all the single-hop vendors they have themselves.

That, and likely Oracle is doing it for free (or thereabout), financing it out of their advertising budget.

Zoom is the success story of these corona-times of ours; the headline alone is marketing gold, particularly considering nobody else in the "startupsphere" will ever give Oracle this sort of visibility - or even the time of day. At a time when Oracle is trying to push an image of being startup-friendly, this is better than the alternatives (each word they tweet on "helping startups" unleashes waves of mean and snarky jokes).

> I've always been baffled when someone hosts on their competitors' platform. Like Netflix hosting on AWS

Netflix had a 5-day outage caused by issues with their private DC back in the day.

IT mgmt. decided their expertise wasn't in operating DC's, SV real estate was too expensive, and doing multi-region themselves was too expensive.

AWS was picked as it was the only viable cloud offering at the time, and the decision was made to be mono-cloud until later. (Azure was used for storing backups.)

Note that AWS was never used for large-scale streaming. Either a partner CDN was used, or now their own CDN.

Source: worked at Netflix.

Thanks! And that makes complete sense - even for a company with that scale and budget, there's some fights not worth fighting when you can get back to doing what you do well and let someone else deal with the stuff you'd have to spend a bunch of effort getting good at.

From my recollection, Netflix started using AWS before Amazon launched Prime Video as well?

Amazon launched and killed a video project several years before prime video

aws was used for storage and encoding initially. source: worked at aws

Encoding servers, but not streaming servers.

The well-known US CDNs were used for streaming.

Also, the cloud they picked doesn't matter because:

1) They used their own ASG UI, Asgard, since AWS initially didn't have one.

2) With around 1,000 engineers, they could migrate clouds at any time at a future date (or build their own CDN. There was no silo politics as in most other companies.)

I work primarily with grocery retailers, and this is quite accurate. Almost all of them have told us that they will not use any of our services if they are hosted in AWS. They used to be hesitant, but willing, but once Amazon acquired Whole Foods, it became a deal breaker.

> and who knows what Amazon will do.

Amazon already has Chime.

If you've ever used Chime, you know it's no threat.

If the amount of revenue you are going to give is a rounding error for AWS, you are not going to move the needle on the funding of their other projects. This should be a non-factor in your decision-making process.

Lots of insiders claim that amazon looks at its competitor's traffic and usage data for ideas. kinda like how grocery stores know which generics to make based on which types of foods do well.

That theory is discussed in other threads. I’m just responding to the “funding the competition” argument, which is a different angle.

You're right, in that the revenue of an incremental customer is negligible to them.

However, as a customer dependent on that particular vendor, one wants to make sure that their cloud provider has no perverse incentive to deprioritize issues one encounters.

^^ this * 1,000,000.

Smart move, really. Build a relationship. Better than funding the competition.

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