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Comment by JCM9 | Hacker News Reader

The author makes some glaring assumptions that these managed services are just sort of managed EC2 with no further optimizations. I find it very hard to believe that this is the case. Just on networking (which is his focus here) there’s a ton of opportunity to optimize networking between physical locations if you’re running a managed database service. It’s very reasonable for AWS to pass those savings onto their customers.

Corey likes to bash AWS for sport. Sometimes he has a point and other times he’s off the mark. Here he’s missed IMHO. He’s swatting in the air trying to find a controversy where there isn’t one.

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AWS spawned off with Amazon realizing the value of dog-fooding, which is using their own products to build other products, and to sell all the steps. That is, the base premise was Amazon Retail being a client like any other of AWS. It is not a stretch to imagine the same goes for many AWS manages services to be built atop EC2. There are many products that are prime candidates for this: API gateway, Kubernetes, Lambda (which is likely built atop the managed kubernetes), etc

Heck, you can look at other cloud providers, and in some cases they are very open about stuff "being build atop public compute". One example that comes to mind is the VPC interconnect of GCP to get reachability between serverless and the rest of the VPC: it uses plain old compute to route the traffic; you can even pick which type and how many to provision.

> Lambda (which is likely built atop the managed kubernetes)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34964197 (Firecracker internals: Inside the technology powering AWS Lambda (2021)) may interest you, but the short version is no, not on top of kubernetes

Cloud Functions from GCP run on top of knative, one can see it in the metadata: keys, but unknown if it's "vanilla" knative or they have their own knative provider that does further trickery under the hood

Lambda was built on top of crosvm, which has been known for very long but only acknowledged recently in their 2021 paper.

GCP doesn’t run knative on top of k8s. They implemented the API on top of their own multi-tenant virtualization software.

Bro there is not a lot of dog fooding, from Apollo to LPT to CDO, retail is not just another customer.

It’s changing though, slowly

You’ve said so many things that are factually incorrect it’s hard to know where to start.

There are very few services on AWS that started based on what Amazon Retail used. Even today, much of Amazon’s infrastructure is not on AWS.

Lambda is also not built on top of Kubernetes.

The one service that I can think of that came from Amazon Retail is Amazon Connect. It was originally used as Amazon’s own call center. You can tell it wasn’t built specifically for AWS because there was no public API for automated provisioning and no IAC support for years.

Google’s infrastructure is also not built on top of GCP. Very little of Google uses GCP and it’s mostly unimportant things.

Much of Amazon infra is on AWS. The capacity you request from capacity manager is just ec2 instances underneath including cloud desktops.

Saying it’s EC2 has a very specific meaning. Does it use the EC2 APIs underneath? Are you running on servers managed by the AWS organization (wheee I work).

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