AWS Summit Toronto Opens With Jabs at Oracle and Microsoft
In the opening keynote address of AWS Summit Toronto in Oct 2019, Burgin didn't mince words in his criticism of other technology vendors:
"Oracle and Microsoft are expensive. They have high lock-in. We don't think they are customer-focused. They're erratic ‒ they'll make decisions overnight based on their own interests, to the detriment of their customers. I would insert a joke here. But we know that databases are serious business at AWS. And this is not Oracle World.”
Our Take
Amazon has frequently touted itself as the world's most customer-centric company, and AWS has often seemed to follow along those lines, continually expanding its range of services and capabilities based on its customers' needs.
It's fair to agree with Burgin that AWS is likely more customer-centric than Oracle or Microsoft. But will AWS users end up any less locked-in once they're running 90% of their workloads using the AWS cloud secret sauce, as Burgin claimed was the firm’s future vision?
Sure, you can get your data out of the cloud any time you want. But if you've built your application architectures using the fantastic platforms that AWS provides, including serverless components such as Amazon Aurora, S3, and AWS Lambda, what are you going to do with that data?
You certainly can't run anything in production that relies on calling AWS services through APIs. You have a big brick of data, but your business can't run a thing. This is like a bank's customer having all their account information but being unable to process any transactions.
AWS certainly offers a great range of customer-centric services that solve real problems. But the more that users take advantage of the excellent value that the AWS cloud provides through its various platforms, the more they're locked-in because they've become fundamentally incapable of running their workloads anywhere else.
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