Great article, agree with 99% of it. What AWS did better than anyone else is building TONS of software (and it's still doing that at an immense speed) on top of their infrastructure. Everyone else is still too focused on hardware/network etc, while the real advantage of something like AWS, the real disruption are things like Lambda or CloudFormation. I can see Microsoft and Google doing it, getting it but not others at the moment. AWS won the battle with developers: everyone we meet, everyone is building software today, loves AWS. Just a coincidence? That's something you can clearly see everywhere in communities, articles, Reddit, HackerNews. Everyone loves to build software with AWS and that's going to become even bigger with something like Lambda, that is just at the beginning of the serverless age. That's where I think Microsoft and Google will struggle the most, trying to replicate this for developers with their platform. And you are right: documentation for these services still sucks a lot in most cases.
Great job and very interesting for us. I'm the founder of https://cloudacademy.com and we are working to open for free part of our content specifically on Amazon Web Services. Agree on having an e-book.
We know that the majority of companies want (and need) to use a hybrid infrastructure, private/public cloud. Moving workloads from private to public and viceversa is the main issue, for several reasons. Managing costs at scale, like you said, is a challenge for many companies that want to go back at some point.
How can you make it easy to move workloads from public to private and viceversa? What are the best providers today offering a complete hybrid platform with public cloud and hardware (dedicated servers or similar)?
Nice, having just completed our path at 500Startups and with a few mentors in my current startup and in my previous business experiences I think I can add something useful from the point of view of the "mentored":
1 - Do no try to mentor too many startups
Useless - I saw this at 500Startups. Too many people are mentoring too many startups. For the entrepreneur or the team you are mentoring the most important thing is bringing your experience to the table. Your specific experience in a specific field, most of the time. There are exceptions, but try to be the mentor of a few set of startups (2 to 4) and focus on them with clear goals also on your side.
2 - Real examples (don't be vague)
Many times after a mentor meeting, as an entrepreneur, you will feel totally lost. You have different mentors and everyone is just telling you different things. You are the one taking the final decision. In this case I usually rely on examples and experiences from those mentors: when you are trying to suggest an option, a specific path or a solution, bring a real example in your conversation. That will create trust and differentiate your opinion from thousands of other comments.
3 - Mentorship is a long path
The best mentors I had were "following" me. That's not having a conversation for an hour or just asking for a couple of suggestions and that's also why, as a mentor, you should be super clear on what you expect in return - it's just the best way to start that relationship.
Just another note.
Most of the people that used to be my mentors became very close friends. In most cases we used to do business together and the fact I was younger helped me getting the best out of that relationships. If you are doing a startup you should try to work with other entrepreneurs that love to be mentors or at least with people that have been in your position before - that will make all the difference.
Super interesting article. I used to be a big fan of Codecademy and other online website to learn to code. The author is right, at some point you need motivation, like in any new thing, and that's where I think most of them are failing.
Without a real project or a constant progress that you can follow, you easily end up abandoning that site.
I built CloudAcademy.com more than a year ago and even if we are focues on Cloud Computing platforms like AWS, one the things we are trying to solve is providing good, constant information to our students on their progresses. That's the most important thing. In our case they really need those skills to they have a very high motivation to complete the courses, but still, I see this as a priority for an e-learning platform.
60% OFF for a Premium Membership of CloudAcademy.com to learn AWS, pass AWS Certifications and use our courses, labs and quizzes/explanations to test your cloud skills.
Thanks for your comment. Actually it doesn't really matter when you are serving static content. No need to think about performance when it comes to S3 for this kind of usage.
Very nice comment, thank you. Look my opinion is that cloud computing is really an important skill that you need in your resume, and if you take a look at 90% of technical job positions today you'll find that they cite AWS skills when they speak about cloud architect, system administrator and even developer position.
The reason is quite simple, AWS is still the leader in the public cloud market and we have thousands of members that are looking for training to pass the certifications (actually we have a dedicated product called CloudCareer for AWS for that).
You're right, they are changing very fast but that's part of the tech world and definitely something that we have already saw for other platforms.
Think about all the companies like Trendmicro or Reverbed that are building product for AWS or Google or Azure, on top of these platforms. Having an AWS certification is really the first goal there and the first need for millions of companies. The same is going to happen with Google Cloud, Azure and so on.
For CloudAcademy.com we have a great challenge about this point: we are developing a technology to keep our content automatically updated with the help of the community and of our algorithms.
Yes, we have a dedicated engineer in our team that is working on them. We are using our own technology to build and serve them. There is a bunch of them ready to be published, always on AWS for now.
Hi everyone, Stefano here from CloudAcademy.com. Just wanted to say that right now everything is for FREE. We are switching to a freemium model in a few weeks.
Yes, definitely. We are adding new questions and learning materials every week and we'll soon have a roadmap to get notified about new courses/learnings.
Requests and comments about courses are very welcome! We started with AWS more than 1 year ago and we are now expanding with Google, Azure, Docker and other cloud technologies.
Stefano here, CEO of CloudAcademy.com, thank you for your comment!
Yes, similar to the concept of Codecademy, but totally focused on cloud computing technologies. Actually in CloudAcademy.com you can test your skills on cloud computing platforms and technologies (AWS, Google etc.) and learn with courses and learning explanations.
Our system is designed around our CloudRank: if you try our quizzes (https://cloudacademy.com/cloud-computing-learning-quizzes/) you will see that we are testing you with a question and right after we show a small learning explanation. Every time you answer you increase or decrease your CloudRank.
We are transitioning to a freemium model, right now all the courses and questions are free and you'll always have a free account to get access to a good number of them.