Comment by hintymad
3 days ago
Just curious, wouldn't it get harder for companies like Databricks or Clickhouse to compete against AWS in the long run? They have better products, for sure. Yet over time, the product gap between what they offer and what AWS offers will narrow, and as a result the cost will be what matters most to the customers. And how can they compete on cost given that they run on AWS?
AWS is always going to be a lego bricks - choose your own adventure or assemble your own stuff option for people who want to struggle with IAM policies. plus AWS VPs compete against each other, so there is no concept of the best opinionated way of doing things. just a bunch of random options with tradeoffs. might attract some nerds. nobody else
Theoretically, yes, if AWS were really focused on they could probably deliver something like databricks; all the components are off the shelf, and a significant number of databricks clusters are on aws anyway. The question though is why; they’re already driving a lot of traffic to AWS and managing all the end customer stuff. The benefit of killing databricks is less than letting it live and grow and buy more from AWS.
Good point. I had the assumption that AWS EMR and Redshift had incentives to compete with Databricks. Another assumption was that someone in the AWS will eventually be ambitious enough to add offerings similar to Databrick's, like how AWS added MKS and OpenSearch. Both assumptions can well be wrong, though.