The article specifically mentioned that the integrations AWS can offer between services simply cannot be competed with by any single company, no matter how good that company makes their own hosted product.
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Yea, that sounds like an excuse.
The APIs are all public. The company can build whatever integrations they want to offer. For example, many already use EC2, VPCs, S3, Lambda, Kinesis, etc. to extend their databases into a client's architecture, and it's no different than what AWS provides.
One difference is that AWS etc. can run software on bare metal if they want. (I suspect they are doing just that with their hosted Kafka offering.) Even with the new EC2 bare metal instances, I don’t think you could roll your own for a competitive price (IME packet.net is much cheaper than EC2 for on-demand bare metal, with a much better UX).
Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka runs on EC2.
Disclosure: I build EC2.
I would be shocked if any service in AWS was running on bare metal.
You would be surprised...
But you're essentially saying if you want to compete with AWS, you have to offer every feature and integration they offer. Good luck to any startup attempting that.
I wonder if a startup opportunity exists to be a B2B only provider that has all the infrastructure trappings of an AWS or Google Cloud, but never selling directly your services on the open market, but instead selling your services contractually to other businesses (in a sense, not sure if my terms are lining up here).
If this is a million dollar idea, I'm just going to give it away I guess, so here goes nothing in explaining it!
Imagine an AWS/Google Cloud like company that only sells B2B, so Cockroach for instance, could pay this company to host their own cloud offerings, plus sell through other cloud offerings of the said B2B service but under their marketing umbrella. The B2B service gets a nice chunk for administration et. el plus some fixed percentage of gross (maybe? i dunno what it'd look like).
I think if you contractually obligate yourself as a business to never sell cloud services directly (only via partners like, in this instance of theory, cockroachDB, but it could redis, mongo, whatever), it'd be a fairly stable and comfortable arrangement.
Could also be a way for other SAAS companies to buy into infrastructure without indirectly funding a potential competitor too.
Maybe its too complicated to achieve, though.
It doesn't make sense for the DB vendors to pay someone else to run a white-labeled managed service for them. It's a source of revenue so they would actually want to be paid for the license and get revenue share from the operator running the managed service.
There are several companies that do managed services like Aiven, IBM's Compose, ObjectRocket, etc so it's possible for them to get involved like this... and it looks like ObjectRocket just did that for CockroachDB: https://www.objectrocket.com/managed-cockroachdb/
I wonder how this would compare to what IFTTT or Zapier does.
AWS doesn't really offer that much between all their products and those integrations are all done over public APIs anyway. Many of the new features they release are just automating away things that people previous hooked up themselves.
I don't see why a startup would have such a problem with it, especially when they control the software as well.