Maybe I’m not alone in this world after all. I have ranted and raved about how terrible Amazon’s cloud is for years now. I used it at two different companies for around two years(been almost a year since I last used it at this point) and it was, by far the worst experience in my professional career. I could go on for an entire afternoon listing all the problems and lack of abilities, features etc that I had experienced — not to mention the costs.
But anyway, onto the article which I found on slashdot. It made my day, well the day is young still so perhaps something better will come along.
A week ago I quoted Piston’s CTO saying that there was a “giant explosion†of companies moving off of Amazon Web Services (AWS). At the time, I noted that he had good reason to say that, since he started a company that builds software used by companies to build private clouds.
[..]
Enterprises that are moving to private clouds tend to be those that had developers start using the cloud without permission.
[..]
Other businesses are “trying to get out,†he said. AWS has made its compute services very sticky by making them difficult for users to remove workloads like databases to run them elsewhere.
Myself I know of several folks who have stuff in Amazon, and for the most part the complaints are similar to mine. Very few that I have heard of are satisfied. The people that seem to be satisfied (in my experience) are those that don’t see the full picture, or don’t care. They may be satisfied because they don’t want to worry about infrastructure no matter the cost, or they want to be able to point the finger at an external service provider when stuff breaks (Amazon’s support is widely regarded as worthless).
“We have thousands of AWS customers, and we have not found anyone who is happy with their tech support,” says Laderman.
I was at a company paying six figures a month in fees and they refused to give us any worthwhile support. Any company in the enterprise space would of been more than happy to permanently station an employee on site to make sure the customer is happy for those kind of payments. Literally everyone who used the Amazon stuff in the company hated it, and the company wanted Amazon to come help show us the way — and they said no.
I am absolutely convinced (as I’ve seen it first and second hand) in many cases the investors in the startups have conflicts of interest and want their startups to use Amazon because the investors benefit from them growing as well. Amazon then uses this marketing stuff to pimp to other customers. This of course happens all over the place with other companies, but there are a lot of folks that are invested in Amazon relatively speaking compared to most other companies.
There’s no need for me to go into specifics as to why Amazon sucks here – for those you can see some of the past posts. This is just a quickie.
Anyway, that’s it for now.. I saw the article and it made me smile.