AWS customers like that there's one bill and one account. Who wants to deal with multiple vendors if they don't have to? It isn't a level playing field when Amazon offers a service.
Amazon could have chosen a cooperative, long-term, strategy and shared some revenue with the authors for some quid-pro-quo, and the world and Amazon, would be better for it. Instead, Amazon chose to cook the goose that lays the golden eggs, now they have to figure it out themselves, and whole ecosystems of services they could have hosted are running away from them.
The reason historically it hasn’t been a level playing field is because Amazon have:
- The ability to invent new infrastructure to suit a need. For example, multi legged ENIs that provide the EKS control plane are simply not available to others,
- The ability to integrate with IAM natively,
- The ability to build common network architectures without outrageous costs (traffic over peering links being a good example since that is what basically all vendors have to do).
This is overthinking it. For nearly every given service, Amazon can just slap together a managed version and it will be the easiest one for people to discover and use if they are already using AWS. It doesn't require any of that special sauce fanciness. Most of their managed offerings are mediocre also-ran versions of things, but they are just easier to use within the existing ecosystem, so they win.
AWS customers like that there's one bill and one account. Who wants to deal with multiple vendors if they don't have to? It isn't a level playing field when Amazon offers a service.
Amazon could have chosen a cooperative, long-term, strategy and shared some revenue with the authors for some quid-pro-quo, and the world and Amazon, would be better for it. Instead, Amazon chose to cook the goose that lays the golden eggs, now they have to figure it out themselves, and whole ecosystems of services they could have hosted are running away from them.