Amazon, a Friendly Giant as Long as It’s Fed

Re:Amazon, a Friendly Giant as Long as It’s Fed by cookiecaper on Sunday July 13, 2014 @02:58PM (#8028276)

If anything, AWS is overrated. It already has some decent competitors and more will grow up soon, though they're massively underutilized. The idea that Amazon itself is critical to internet infrastructure is very disturbing, yet in many cases, it's true these days. We really need to get other cloud providers in the mix.

Amazon as a retail store has been consistently great for me in all major aspects. Any issues I've had with orders have been promptly resolved and Amazon has gone to bat for me several times. I agree that Wal-mart or another major department store could give Amazon a run for its money if they played their cards right, but like you, I don't think they're in that headspace.

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Re:Amazon, a Friendly Giant as Long as It’s Fed by dm2 on Sunday July 13, 2014 @03:21PM (#8028328)

SES is really the only AWS service that has not been done by anyone else as far as I know. Some of the SES features (spam reporting for instance) requires cooperation between email service providers and Amazon, something that many other companies would have difficulty arranging.

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Re:Amazon, a Friendly Giant as Long as It’s Fed by cookiecaper on Sunday July 13, 2014 @08:38PM (#8029082)

Yeah, the issue isn't really that there are no similar services available, it's just that people don't really use those services very much. There are several search engines competing against Google too, but if Google blackballs your site and you're dependent on organic search traffic, you're still going to lose 90% of your visitors overnight.

Internet infrastructure is pretty important, so it's a little more disconcerting to me if some huge percentage of sites are dependent on the same single ISP/datacenter/etc.

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Re:Amazon, a Friendly Giant as Long as It’s Fed by rgbrenner on Sunday July 13, 2014 @04:46PM (#8028511)

SES is really the only AWS service that has not been done by anyone else as far as I know.

sendgrid is like 5 years old: http://sendgrid.com/

mailchimp's version: http://mandrill.com/

rackspace: http://www.mailgun.com/

also: https://postmarkapp.com/

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Re:Amazon, a Friendly Giant as Long as It’s Fed by dm2 on Sunday July 13, 2014 @04:53PM (#8028530)

I had never explored Mandrill, thanks.

SES is still the cheapest (especially when scaling up) and extremely fast from my experience with it.

Here is a good article I found about SES and competitors such as Mandrill: http://www.ventureharbour.com/transactional-email-service-be...

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Re:Amazon, a Friendly Giant as Long as It’s Fed by wavefunction on Sunday July 13, 2014 @11:28PM (#8029412)

The difference betwen SES and Mandrill? With Mandrill you'll be patronizing a great company with some fantastic folks.

(First used MailChimp in 2003 and they've always been the bomb.)

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Re:Amazon, a Friendly Giant as Long as It’s Fed by dm2 on Sunday July 13, 2014 @11:46PM (#8029438)

Before 2012 (when they launched Mandrill) MailChimp used Amazon SES. http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=f7b9ee22124ff6454424dc10...

The Mandrill service is nice, I agree.

Also, MailChimp has a very cool 404 page: http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/transactional-reports-overvi...

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