AWS's inevitable destiny: becoming the next Lumen

Does AWS actually care whether end users know a SaaS product is running on AWS? Probably not. AWS is paid by the SaaS company to host the platform. That’s the core business model.

The opposite would be more concerning. If I knew in advance that a service was running on Azure, I might think twice before using it. AWS has strong brand confidence, which arguably makes them the “plumbing” of the internet. Most users don’t care or even think about this anyway.

If AWS doesn’t have a single killer feature that makes everyone want to use them, then yes, they become a Lumen. In that case, their killer feature is reliability.

Calling out any cloud provider’s downtime is poor form. No platform is perfect; all of them experience outages. Cloudflare once mocked another provider for an outage, only to suffer a major one themselves the following week. Karma.

I agree with the point about Bedrock. As an AWS loyalist, I found it underwhelming and never went back to it. That’s a real problem for AWS if they want new products to gain traction.

The article is completely right about one thing. AWS needs a Netlify-style product if it wants to be seen as cool or relevant in this current tech phase. They have something close, but as usual, it’s more complicated than it needs to be.