Comments on: What Startups in Amazon's Ecosystem Should Learn From VMware

By: SEDAC RS

SEDAC RS — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 19:15:05 +0000

@TheatroSaoPedro recebe a exposição fotográfica “Amazônia, Tão Perto, Tão Longe”, de Dulce Helfer, nesta terça! http://t.co/RMUkIEvD

By: New Amazon AWS Public Beta Announced

New Amazon AWS Public Beta Announced — Mon, 18 May 2009 18:00:38 +0000

[...] What Startups in Amazon’s Ecosystem Should Learn From VMware (gigaom.com) [...]

By: jsensarma

jsensarma — Mon, 04 May 2009 05:41:57 +0000

in some ways elastic map-reduce is a step in this direction. people could already run map-reduce on ec2 and s3 – EMR bundles it all up with a management console etc. to make life simpler for lesser geeks.

By: Paul Lopez

Paul Lopez — Mon, 04 May 2009 03:52:25 +0000

Sarah makes a good connection between the two. It depends if AMZN wants to be more vertically integrated. Sometimes we go with “Best of Need versus Best of Breed.” my quote, feel free to use :)

http://lopezunwired.com
http://twitter.com/lopezunwired

By: Sujit Mohanty

Sujit Mohanty — Sun, 03 May 2009 23:04:44 +0000

If Amazon were to make a corporate acquisition, they would purchase Elastra. They funded part of Elastra’s Series B for $8M. Most likely to do an acquisition for down the road.

By: pool party

pool party — Sun, 03 May 2009 21:39:08 +0000

There are opensource projects also trying to address the cloud management issues. Pool party is an instance http://github.com/auser/poolparty/tree/master . If things pan amazon may build of the available opensource tools :-).

By: Neill

Neill — Sun, 03 May 2009 17:59:54 +0000

I think Amazon is the opposite to Microsoft. They only want to develop what is necessary and happy to use as much open source as possible. Customers do require some management etc and some startup companies will have developed products that Amazon will replace. They are the Wal-Mart of computing. They are only interested in the high-volume, highly automated business. So they will not go into consulting or into specialistic areas which they cannot make high volume. In the longer term amazon may buy Ecalyptus so they can supply hybrid clouds which wolud move them more towards the enterprise software business.

By: knujlla

knujlla — Sun, 03 May 2009 17:36:16 +0000

Your observation is a good one, Sarah.

In terms of parallels with VMWare, to me, they seem still focused inwards on the compute-only part of the data center – whether it comes to security, policy, workflow orchestration, performance management etc. For security they have VMSafe for which a lot of work has to be done by an incumbent security vendor; and they have vShield which is only for corralling VMs within their compute environment. For a data center to run, the concept of vShield needs to span the other elements in the DC; even vCenter has a web services API available for others to exercise. This is the reason system mgmt incumbents like IBM and HP will continue to be the aggregators and majority margins will continue to go to them (See WSJ article on BestBuy as another non-virt, non-cloudy example – http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124078866665357525.html).

Same goes for what VMWare seems to have done with B-Hive (by taking it from physical & virtual to virtual-only), same with Dunes Tech for the Orchestrator which again is for compute only tasks.

I believe that when AWS does make the workflows (the ones you alluded to in the post) more automated, several opportunities will continue to crop for, say, tying the compute containers to the rest of the infrastructure – both intra AWS and inter-public and private ‘clouds’.

By: Jeffrey

Jeffrey — Sun, 03 May 2009 16:59:11 +0000

Having to apply patches and do your own configuration is not a bug, it’s a feature.

Amazon doesn’t as a rule chase “high-margin businesses,” and they’ve already ceded the management layer to companies that operate in their ecosystem like RightScale.