Amazon’s Cloud Crisis: How AWS Will Lose the Future of Computing | Hacker News Reader

Amazon’s Cloud Crisis: How AWS Will Lose the Future of Computing

semianalysis.com

13 pointsheadalgorithm14 comments

This article does not answer the promise of the headline. It is about the history of AWS. The headline is at best inaccurate, at worst clickbait.

It's 100% clickbait, as the second part of the article is available only to paid subscribers.

I don't really consider that clickbait. You've just described most subscriber-only content from analysts and others. But not sure how useful it is to post half an article here.

"something (such as a headline) designed to make readers want to click on a hyperlink especially when the link leads to content of dubious value or interest."[1]

The article you get when clicking isn't the content promised by the headline. To get the content promised, one needs to go to a second article, which requires a fee.

If that's not clickbait, I dunno what is.

1: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/clickbait

Your beef is really with whoever submitted the headline. I certainly don't assume I have full access to reports on analyst sites.

What's here is mostly a rather positive retrospective. The critique of their strategy is subscriber-only content. But, yes, the headline is a tease for something that non-subscribers can't read.

The article does answer the question, in detail. What you're reading is just the first half is freely available. The 2nd half is on the same web page and for subscribers.

As much as devs like to moan about AWS and it’s “problems” it is by far the best cloud out there. The moat is so vast that I really doubt any current provider will ever catch up.

Also we don’t know what they have in the works in terms of innovation.

And they still have massive room to go from Lego blocks (disjointed components) to massive integration and value added services. Thus has already began in my observation. I think we’ll see massive scaling in this area.

> The moat is so vast that I really doubt any current provider will ever catch up.

While I agree AWS is king today, this notion that no one will ever catch up have been said many times of other businesses throughout history and truthfully only time will tell if that remains true.

At one point in time it was hard to ever imagine someone dethroning Google search. Now I can only imagine it’s a matter of time before people prefer asking AI questions they use to query Google for in majority of cases.

I started using Azure in 2018 -- it sucked but I had to use it because my company was entrenched in the MS ecosystem (as are many companies). Over time it sucked less, that when I left in 2021, Azure was in a semi-usable state.

AWS had an 8 year lead over all cloud providers at one point, but that gap is shrinking. MS has a stronghold over enterprises in a way that AWS can never have (O365 and Azure AD are huge). AWS might have mindshare among startups/tech companies but Azure's market share among traditional corporates is huge (largely out of lack of choice -- it's really a pain to integrate a MS stack with AWS).

So nothing is inevitable.

GCP though is not anywhere close.

The moat isn't vast at all, and the AWS market share lead is shrinking every year. Microsoft is very well positioned to say the least.

Would anyone care to summarize the for-pay part that makes the titular assertion?

I can guess the Microsoft / OpenAI partnership might lead speculation on the notion of Microsoft "winning" because Azure is hosting AI workloads. But that's me imagining "completions" of the headline.

I could ask GPT, but I'd be more interested in talking about the actual assertion.

AWS has won cloud computing, whether or not cloud computing continues to dominate is the real question.

'semianalysis' indeed

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