MDB - Bezos Letter excludes DocumentDB

Jeff Bezos released his annual shareholder letter this morning. It’s an easy short read, especially worthwhile for those of you like myself that still own a large stake in AMZN

https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/2018-letter-to-sha…

One of the things I noted, is that he spends two of his twenty-three paragraphs talking about Amazon’s AWS database offerings, and mentions DynamoDB multiple times, yet he doesn’t mention DocumentDB once.

He does mention that relational databases are sometimes not ideal, but not anything specifically about DocumentDB. Makes me wonder if it hasn’t been that successful so far and he wants to temper his enthusiasm rather than rah rah’ing something now, that was greeted with a lot of press when originally released, but may not be significant going forward.

I’m very possibly likely reading too much into it. If he hadn’t spent so much of the letter on databases, I wouldn’t even mention it. But he did, and DocumentDB is nowhere to be seen.

Might not mean anything for MDB, but certainly can’t be bad.

…we invented DynamoDB, a highly scalable, low latency key-value database now used by thousands of AWS customers. And on the listening carefully-to-customers side, we heard loudly that companies felt constrained by their commercial database options and had been unhappy with their database providers for decades – these offerings are expensive, proprietary, have high-lock-in and punitive licensing terms. We spent several years building our own database engine, Amazon Aurora, a fully-managed MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible service with the same or better durability and availability as the commercial engines, but at one-tenth of the cost. We were not surprised when this worked.

But we’re also optimistic about specialized databases for specialized workloads. Over the past 20 to 30 years, companies ran most of their workloads using relational databases. The broad familiarity with relational databases among developers made this technology the go-to even when it wasn’t ideal. Though sub-optimal, the data set sizes were often small enough and the acceptable query latencies long enough that you could make it work. But today, many applications are storing very large amounts of data – terabytes and petabytes. And the requirements for apps have changed. Modern applications are driving the need for low latencies, real-time processing, and the ability to process millions of requests per second. It’s not just key-value stores like DynamoDB, but also in-memory databases like Amazon ElastiCache, time series databases like Amazon Timestream, and ledger solutions like Amazon Quantum Ledger Database – the right tool for the right job saves money and gets your product to market faster.

-mekong

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“And on the listening carefully-to-customers side, we heard loudly that companies felt constrained by their commercial database options and had been unhappy with their database providers for decades – these offerings are expensive, proprietary, have high-lock-in and punitive licensing terms.”

That sounds very much like he is pointing directly at Oracle.

I look forward to whether SteppenWulf has any thoughts to add in this thread.

As one small aside, with Larry Ellison (Oracle founder) jumping onto the Tesla board near the end of 2018, perhaps any rivalry in the space realm between Bezos with Blue Origin and Musk with SpaceX could extend slightly to Larry Ellison now too.

volfan84
long MDB

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He is absolutely pointing at Oracle. They have a reputation for not making their customers very happy. Its the only past-employer of mine where I tell friends who I work for and they tell me how unhappy they are with Oracle. This didn’t happen with Texas Instruments, Motorola, AMD, or Apple. Oracle also grew their cloud by strong-arming their old legacy customers into moving. Of note, Amazon is in the process (or already completed) moving off Oracle software themselves.

I see nothing here to spark a worry with MDB.

This letter is one example why I still have a 5% stake in AMZN.

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I see nothing here to spark a worry with MDB.

Agreed, I probably didn’t state it too clearly above, but if anything, I was viewing this as a potential positive for MDB, since DocumentDB wasn’t mentioned explicitly

-mekong

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Also, 1 brief mention on Elasticache. Nothing on Open Distro.

I hope everyone invested in SaaS stocks takes time to read Bezos letters even if they aren’t stockholders. If anyone has shown an ability to see what’s coming down the road and strategically address it years ahead of time, it’s Bezos. Oracle is exactly the kind of bloated company I think he would look at and think ‘hmmmm… we can do it better and make a load of $$$ at the same time.’ The (few) Amazon folks I know well always seem to use Oracle as an example of what they don’t want to be. Makes more sense to target them more than Mongo I think. But I sure ain’t Bezos-for all I know he’ll come straight for MDB tomorrow

Disclosure: Long MDB(7%) long Amazon (10%)

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Also, 1 brief mention on Elasticache. Nothing on Open Distro.

Just so we are clear. Elasticache has absolutely no relation to Elastic Search. The company or the product.

Elasticache is a cloud product. Many things in cloud computing are named “elastic”.

It refers to the ability inherent in cloud computing infrastructure to expand to scale up as a company’s needs require (during high use periods) and then return back to the normal use.

AWS Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) is their CPU instances that work “elastically”. Elasticache is for in-memory data store. Thus elastic+cache.

Darth

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DocumentDB is just one more wannabe in a long tail of wannabes.

Denny Schlesinger

Thanks Darth. I thought it meant AWS Elastic search. Still no mention of either that or Opendistro…

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