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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

Completely expected this from AWS: A marketplace (Bedrock) for foundation AI models, including Amazon's own (Titan).

Amazon is surely hoping this will generate enough revenue to make up for all the AWS customers who lately have been looking at their AWS bills with a fine-toothed comb, wondering how is it they've ended up spending so much on cloud services, which were supposed to be more efficient and flexible.

Amazon's hope is well-placed. This will likely generate meaningful revenue in the short run, given how much hype there is around AI right now, and how much pressure is being put by executives everywhere to show they have a "generative AI strategy." Now all those executives can say, "our developers are building new applications using generative AI from AWS," period. No one in enterprise land gets fired for using AWS.

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Why would the executives use some unknown AI model from AWS which is not well tested or benchmarked against the plethora of OpenAI LLMs from Azure?

The LLM system of any company might be independent enough to run on a separate cloud. AWS so far has not even talked about any system capabilities they have. They might be hoping for some open source alternative to emerge which could shift the business to hosting in which they might excel.

For MANY companies, the AWS solutions are automatically approved and only require putting on the IT backlog. Any other vendor or cloud could easily take a year or more to bring online and would require an excruciating amount of scrutiny for every integration that you wanted to turn on. AWS often doesn't even require any budget review/approval.

AWS has done a great job selling itself as the trustable, secure and one-stop shop to IT.

Most of them must already be using something Microsoft (Office 365/Windows enterprise). So Microsoft will not be a new vendor. Something like Azure GPT4 will be just so powerful that I doubt most corporations can resist. And it doesn't have to be in the same cloud unlike a database.

In my experience, that has not been true. Setting up Azure is its own major undertaking and requires an entire separate set of security reviews and approvals.

Not only this but tons of places have "excess" to spend on AWS and so buy stuff through the AWS Marketplace. All kinds of SaaS sell things through the marketplace because its just easier at many companies to get purchases through them.

AWS is trustable and secure though. That's why it's easier for enterprises to use, because they have all the compliance and SLAs enumerated and enforced.

Because you're already hosted on AWS and it's "good enough (tm)." That's basically the argument for why you use anything on AWS. They're not best-in-class in most of their service offerings.

Yeah this seems like a big win for Azure overall, which is otherwise not compelling vs AWS unless you are all in on MS stack (Windows, SQL Server)

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