Quantity does not always mean quality

During Re:Invent were announced another dozen of AWS services. Now cloud provider has almost 200 of them. And among the basics, always necessary services such as databases, servers, and different storage options, there are completely outlandish. For example, a time-series database or QLDB based on blockchain.

Let’s leave behind whether such narrow use cases should be covered with dedicated service and whether development pays off. My personal opinion is the following: at such scale, innovation can sometimes be done for innovation only, and not for actual market capture or offering a new, effective way to solve the old issue.

Let’s imagine that you already run some kind of payload on AWS using a standard set of services (EC2, RDS, S3, etc). And you need some unusual service. There is a high probability that by deploying and starting to use such a service you will find that there is no integration with existing ones or it is minimal.

For example, Athena - kind of Hive in the browser - you store data on S3 and run your SQL queries in a web console to search and analyze through this data. Very convenient and fast. At the time of launch, back in 2016, even integration with S3, the basis of Athena itself, left much to be desired. And integration with CloudWatch, a monitoring service, did not appear until early 2019. That is before there was no real way to track the execution time of the request and identify bottlenecks.

Around the same time, Glue - an ETL service was introduced. And again no integration between services for a year as far as I can remember. Although both of these data analytics solutions are very closely related and mutually complementary and depend on other, external services and data sources.

And this happens with all services: AWS launches, in fact, an MVP, which is developed based on popularity and customer feedback. Not to say such an approach is not justified from a business perspective - if the product is not popular, then why invest in it. Or actual customer feedback is completely different to service team plans and expectations. However, initial integration between new services and existing core-products is a key to increase the attractiveness and operability of the new service and something needed from the start. Otherwise, it is a cloud solution from one of the DB manufacturers who put their software and hardware in their data center and called it a cloud. Ignoring what is cloud according to NIST.

On the other hand, obviously that sometimes you do a blind shot hoping for the best, and that new service will earn customers love and attention. It hurts if due to the lack of fast and massive growth in service consumption, investments in it quickly fade out.