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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

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chrisseaton·

> So then they have to...

Why do they have to?

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To make money

Can they not compete with Amazon? The developers know the product best.

I think the real problem is that in a lot of companies, there’s a huge institutional inertia towards adding a new supplier vs. paying an existing supplier slightly more.

ElasticSearch or Redis seem like a good example of the challenges with that approach. Managing contracts is tedious and there's a substantial convenience factor for the difference between “click and it's running on your existing bill” and “go somewhere else, get setup with a license, take over O&M for your own servers”.

If it's really critical, you'll do that but a company has to be really dependent on a piece of software (or unusually cognizant of the open source maintainership problem) to go the second route. Built-in defaults carry a lot of weight.

Jfrog is available on AWS marketplace, so at least they have the same convenience even if papa Jeff still takes a cut.

Partially - the AWS Marketplace can avoid a procurement (which can be huge) but then you’re running EC2 servers. The popularity of services like RDS suggests there’s a good percentage of the market which will choose managed options, which is great for them but doesn’t help the upstream developers unless a cloud provider supports that development.

They know their product best, and Amazon knows hosting best. So competing with Amazon hosting their product is an uphill battle.

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