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Comment by cle | Hacker News Reader

This is the most important point, IMO. Amazon's value add is not the software itself, it's the operation of the software. That includes a LOT of stuff, not just making sure it's running. It's security modeling and patching, compliance, DDOS protection, etc. Amazon's product is an army of ops engineers working 24/7 to keep your stuff secure and online.

With that in mind, their behavior here makes a lot more sense, and comparing it with companies who have dramatically different products, like Facebook and Google, takes a lot of effort to understand the differences and what impact they have.

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You can rent a car but nobody would suggest the car manufacturer be paid nothing for the privilege just cause the rental company cracked car maintenance and how to fill the tank.

The AWS "value add" is only value add in the context of being locked into AWS in the first place.

I'm not sure if I like your comparison to be honest.. not only is it not _just_ maintenance and filling the tank, if we stick with your picture, there is also things like buying the car, paying for it when no one uses it, insuring the car, repairing the car, general logistics of moving it around when someone has a one way rental, etc. - basically making it convenient for consumers to rent a car.

Looking at what "as a service" providers of open source software do though, that is taking it a step further, since they wrap the software in a layer that _smoothes_ out changes for the user. Going back to the rental company that would equate to the car manufacturer deciding the indicator needs to be on the right side of the steering wheel now and the rental company installing an adaptor so that it remains on the left for you, to keep the look and feel for the user the same.

Not a perfect comparison, but they never are :)

A lot of people on HN have very simplistic views of industries. I sometimes wonder how they're not all billionaires. Everything is easy, simple, *just* this one thing. You'd imagine they're out there killing it.

Elasticsearch is not a car manufacturer. They are an after market manufacturer for a car which they got without paying themselves. Too many people completely ignore that the heart of Elasticsearch is Lucene. Elasticsearch adds things on top of it, but without Lucene it would be useless. Elasticsearch is the same as Amazon here, but mentioning that doesn't make for such a nice narrative.

AWS just has engineers full stop. No specific ops engineers.

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