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Comment by mason55 | Hacker News Reader

> they build cloud agnostic software that treats providers as a utility

It's like browsers all over again. As long as each provider is offering different things or different implementations of the same thing we will either need to choose one or be forced to go through a lowest common denominator translation layer.

MSFT, GOOG, and AMZN are all smart enough to not turn this into a race to the bottom of who can provide the cheapest scalable instances. They'll all try to differentiate on features and so it's going to be a long time until you can treat these as a utility.

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I think you're right in that Amazon Machine Learning and Azure Machine Learning will never be drop-in replacements for eachother.

However, I would argue that VPSs are already drop-in replacements and I bet (though I have no proof) that VPSs are the majority of the market. The cloud providers may not have a viable way to provide even the perception of vendor lock-in when it comes to VPSs.

Now it could be that prices and profits stay high anyways as the market is an oligopoly. The U.S. has experienced the same thing with mobile operators. This is also far from obvious though because entrance barriers for VPSs don't seem steep.

Sure, a basic VPS could be a drop-in replacement, but think of all the stuff that goes on with managing that. If you want to automate the creation of new servers then you have to script it or use something like CloudFormation or Troposphere. Either way you are immediately off the "drop-in replacement" path unless you build a middleware layer for your scripts.

These guys make their money off the companies that need to be able to automate infrastructure and that stuff is becoming more, not less, fragmented.

Terraform works with whatever cloud provider https://www.terraform.io/intro/vs/cloudformation.html

hint hint

Even bigger than VPS is storage, which is the closest thing you will get to a commodity/drop in replacement in the cloud.

It was recently reported that Apple was spending hundreds of millions of dollars on S3 (before they switched). I think it's safe to assume that a couple of billion dollars of AWS revenue is cheap commodity storage.... which has low switching costs.

Well so far MSFT and GOOG are regularly slashing prices to keep up with AMZN's price cuts. So we're in the price war stage still, not much at the differentiation stage.

> So we're in the price war stage still, not much at the differentiation stage.

Depends what you're looking for I suppose. If all you need is basic compute instances then, yes, it's a price war. Any products beyond that have a tenuous relationship between the different providers.

Even something as simple as using a columnar DB pretty much locks you into one of the providers because you have to build around all the nuances of SQL Server vs. RedShift (Postgres) vs. BigQuery.

Forget talking about things like infrastructure automation once you're trying to manage this on demand across many environments in a reproducible way.

This isn't correct.

Amazon has not matched our May 2015 price cut for GCE (they instead have tossed a couple 5% cuts). They responded to our 2014 cut a day later. We saw a similar reaction with Nearline last year; a few months later they introduced S3 Infrequent Access, but it has plenty of caveats (rounding up to 128 KB per object) and still a 25% higher price per byte.

In the meantime we introduced custom shapes for GCE giving our customers a measured 20% savings. Finally, even Microsoft has per-minute billing.

If you're looking for the best price/performance you'll have to come to Google Cloud.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud, so of course I want your business ;)

You have it backwards. It's Google that's slashing prices. The others are begrudgingly reacting.

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