Peak AWS? Do we still need AWS?


English   •   12 octobre 2019

I am reacting to the following post, because it matches my recent experience with AWS: AWS Elasticsearch: a fundamentally-flawed offering.

That’s my overall experience with AWS as well.

They used to be quite reliable and have good support, but I have found that over time, the overall service is not as good or as essential as before.

If you use services that are not simple base EC2 instances, the costs are very high (like for example DynamoDB) and certainly too expensive to build a platform leveraging those added-value components at scale.

As an Open Source developer, I am also annoyed by their recent new offering that consist in taking Open Source software and build a SaaS offering on top of it. The main problem is that they do so without working with the main stack developers. They do not contribute back their code change either (to my knowledge). This end up with the kind of offering like AWS Elastic Search that is both hurting Elastic Search company, Elastic Search project and end up providing a bad experience to their customers.

To be fair, this is a more general question for the governance of Open Source projects, though, as you cannot expect cloud providers to pay fees at this scale. Passed a certain point in popularity, Open Source projects likely need to be led by a mixed team of contributors from a larger range of companies. The same question would arrise on Redis or MongoDB for example.

Anyway, this race to expand AWS offering through integration of Open Source components as a service or to provide higher value APIs seems to be at the expense of quality and customer service.

There is now plenty of decent alternatives for the base hosting part.
So, I am wondering if we have passed the point where we don’t need AWS anymore.

Do you have the same experience?