AWS releases Glue Databrew, a visual ETL tool
The thing folks don't mention regarding AWS is the inherent competitive advantage their micro-startups have. We focus on AWS launching managed ElasticSearch or managed Kafka, and talk about them (legally) using open source contributions to make money, but I think those are minor compared to things like this.<p>What AWS has is a culture and institutional knowledge on how to launch new products that take foundational AWS services (S3, Lambda, EC2, DDB, etc.) and glues (!) them together better than what a competing non-AWS company can do. This is a bold claim (since AWS launches some very crappy products), but imagine being able to use AWS infrastructure at cost, having internal knowledge on how to best optimize that infrastructure and access to the engineers that own those services while you build abstractions and better user experiences on top of them.<p>I don't know how cos that compete in any related space can survive. When AWS is willing to throw whatever against a wall (launching 50+ services a year) to see what sticks, sooner or later they're going to land in your space.<p>Become more locked into AWS's foundational services -> these abstractions on top of them start to make more sense in engineering complexity / delivery time / possible cost dimensions -> Use more of these -> Become more locked into AWS's foundational services.<p>This feels very different from Azure or GCP.