The runtime/data-plane APIs are not the moat. There already exist compatible APIs for at least some of AWS services (S3, DynamoDB), and many others use standard/open APIs (SQL), or very simple APIs (SNS, SQS, Firehose, even Lambda and ECS).
It’s the very deep auth/RBAC mechanisms, the automation of control plane/setup, the integration of the services to use together which are the operational barrier to competion. And the history of durability and availability, and clear guidance as to design considerations for reliability which are the trust barriers to competition. Oh, and there are economies of scale even for datacenter—learning to design, build, and operate them has a pretty steep curve.
The easy part is getting easier. The hard part isn’t (well it is, because AWS provides an example, and because LLMs make everything faster. They make AWS better too, though, and AWS has the people/institutional knowledge to get excellent use of LLMs on these topics.
I’m not saying AWS is immune to competition on core services, only that it won’t be a swarm of startups, it’ll be gradual change of equilibrium with other large providers. That said, for newer services, there’s a lot of room for competition with startups built on AWS, which do the new functions better than AWS does, because they make different tradeoffs, like not being fully compatible with AWS auth/setup/billing/management interfaces, which are by necessity rather complex. Even there, the risk is interesting and probably different from recent history. Previously, small competitors to AWS in areas that AWS wants to get good at just get acquired, and become part of AWS. Now it may be more feasible for AWS to rapidly compete with them and implement AWS-style services that make the startup far less attractive to customers.
[ disclaimer: I have worked for companies related to this topic, and this opinion is not based on anything but my speculation and outside knowledge ]
The runtime/data-plane APIs are not the moat. There already exist compatible APIs for at least some of AWS services (S3, DynamoDB), and many others use standard/open APIs (SQL), or very simple APIs (SNS, SQS, Firehose, even Lambda and ECS).
It’s the very deep auth/RBAC mechanisms, the automation of control plane/setup, the integration of the services to use together which are the operational barrier to competion. And the history of durability and availability, and clear guidance as to design considerations for reliability which are the trust barriers to competition. Oh, and there are economies of scale even for datacenter—learning to design, build, and operate them has a pretty steep curve.
The easy part is getting easier. The hard part isn’t (well it is, because AWS provides an example, and because LLMs make everything faster. They make AWS better too, though, and AWS has the people/institutional knowledge to get excellent use of LLMs on these topics.
I’m not saying AWS is immune to competition on core services, only that it won’t be a swarm of startups, it’ll be gradual change of equilibrium with other large providers. That said, for newer services, there’s a lot of room for competition with startups built on AWS, which do the new functions better than AWS does, because they make different tradeoffs, like not being fully compatible with AWS auth/setup/billing/management interfaces, which are by necessity rather complex. Even there, the risk is interesting and probably different from recent history. Previously, small competitors to AWS in areas that AWS wants to get good at just get acquired, and become part of AWS. Now it may be more feasible for AWS to rapidly compete with them and implement AWS-style services that make the startup far less attractive to customers.
[ disclaimer: I have worked for companies related to this topic, and this opinion is not based on anything but my speculation and outside knowledge ]