AWS partners are a critical part of the growing ecosystem, but the choice between third-party services and the waiting game for native tooling can create problems for users.
There’s a constant balancing act between Amazon and its AWS partners over how best to fill the gaps in its cloud platform — and that creates a set of dilemmas for customers, too.
Amazon has put considerable effort in recent years into expanding its ecosystem, with more than 2,400 AWS partners in technology and consulting. At the same time, it’s constantly churning out improvements to its cloud platform, adding hundreds of upgrades and new services every year. Those parallel efforts can create a strain as both sides try to fill the gaps. For customers, the uncertainty around the ever-changing ecosystem can mean tough decisions for their own environment.
Amazon releases the minimal viable product and iterates from there to add more features, so the challenge often becomes deciding to wait for those additions or go third-party, said Theo Kim, vice president, technical operations and security at Jobvite, Inc., a recruiting software company in San Mateo, Calif. Kim used the example of Web Application Firewall from Amazon which he said has a great price point, but Jobvite is holding out for an expected version that supports Elastic Load Balancing (ELB).
More of the TechTarget article from Trevor Jones
