Comment by brainless
4 years ago
The time when Apache or MySQL started out was very different. Imagine where the internet would be if cloud computing itself didn't take off.
Do you remember a time when there were hundreds of hosting providers? Do you remember WebHostingTalk where admins would go to check hosting offers from suppliers around the world?
The monopolies finished that era. So I don't think that software companies trying to adapt now can be seen through the lens of what was 15 years ago.
There are more hosting providers today than in the era you are talking about. AWS has a "monopoly" simply because large companies are using it, and back in the day those companies would have run their own datacenters not used a shared PHP host. For a personal site or startup you have a thousand other options.
I wouldn't say AWS has a monopoly. There are tons of providers ranging from Digital Ocean to Google Cloud. AWS is just the largest because they've been around the longest. They're so deeply entrenched in Cloud that most people automatically think of them. I think things such as Netflix talking about their engineering and how they use AWS was a major boost at the start. Now a days people are literally studying to become AWS certified. We even have a AWS specialised working at my company. AWS and other cloud providers are also very smart in locking in start ups by offering them thousands upon thousands of free credit. Build your MVP on there and then end up vendor locked in but think it's a good thing.
I heard a tidbit that I don't know if it's true or not but I would like to think it is. AWS has become so expensive for some companies that they're starting to migrate back to their own datacentres.
I think you need to get a reality check. I have worked as an early engineer to 12 or more startups in the last 15 years and am very active in communities ranging from HN, IndieHackers, OnDeck or a dozen others.
I have not come across a single founder in the last 5-6 years who does not start with AWS credits or is not craving for them.
AWS is nothing but monopoly and they have utilized access to their cash to buy early customers. The same goes for Google and MS. The smaller hosting providers that you believe exist actually are stuck with whatever customers they used to have or a chance new WordPress blog.
Everything doesn't run on AWS. In Europe where a company might only sell to one country, like Sweden where I live for example many won't see the traffic required to scale beyond a single box, those same smaller companies might also not want to pay with their kidneys to host that one VM. Cloudflare is making this possible, so for smaller businesses and sites one could argue that Cloudflare is the real monopoly (entirely different markets).
Now companies like Shopify is enabling people to run a shop without any ops for peanuts.
Or smaller SMB it environments, we run a small datacenter at my company running VMware software to run our customers domain controllers, erps, fileservers and such, though this is decreasing, we used to run Exchange too, but migrated every customer to Office365 because it's cheaper than on-premise licensing, and we have 0 ops. The fact that we're local means we can offer dark fibre to many customer sites, giving them 0ms latency to us, making even the chattiest shit system run like things were on their premises. I guess we're "computing at edge" :p
Not saying you're wrong that AWS is a cloud monopoly, but everyone isn't purchasing in the cloud market (the majority of the worlds money doesn't flow through startups going global). And there's also Azure which is growing at an incredible rate challenging AWS at migrating legacy workloads to the cloud.
I'm not even that sure this is true in absolute numbers, but I'm pretty sure it is not in relative figures. There are waaaay more customer/businesses on the Internet today than there were 15 years ago and not that many providers more.
Do you have a source for the data that there isn't significantly more hosting providers today? The ease of setting up Plesk or CPanel to become a shared hosting provider today is incredible, essentially 0 maintenance so I doubt your statement holds true, considering how many more people are on the Internet today compared to 15 years ago.