> by just installing and maintaining that product as a service?
You are seriously underestimating the value Amazon provides by "just installing and maintaining" those services. Maintaining a service at the scale they offer is a huge undertaking.
You get the high-availability, the hundreds of engineers working to keep those services up and make them talk to other AWS services easily. You get teams of engineers on-call to react to any failures.
I agree with you that this has a bad effect on the companies that originally created those projects, but I do see a huge value in what Amazon offers.
> ...they can install and maintain but don't have to develop it too.
As someone building distributed systems, I'd think you'd appreciate that merely "installing" Elasticsearch wouldn't simply cut it for the scale AWS operates at.
I wish Elastic would have focused on their differentiated offerings instead and had let go of their iron grip on Elasticsearch itself (perhaps by creating a Foundation around it).
You are seriously underestimating the value Amazon provides by "just installing and maintaining" those services. Maintaining a service at the scale they offer is a huge undertaking.
You get the high-availability, the hundreds of engineers working to keep those services up and make them talk to other AWS services easily. You get teams of engineers on-call to react to any failures.
I agree with you that this has a bad effect on the companies that originally created those projects, but I do see a huge value in what Amazon offers.