How does Netlify position itself against Amplify and App Runner, the AWS products in the same space?

I think what everybody's trying to do right now is find the right way to onboard people into a new way of working. Depending on what the company's doing, their incentives are different. In AWS's case, their incentive is to build an abstraction on top of AWS technology so that people who are in the AWS ecosystem have a quick on-ramp into using their tools. Amplify is that. You have a preconfigured bundle of AWS services that, if you go through that on-ramp, you have a really good experience. I mean, it's great. They've done a really good job. What I've found is that there's a little bit of a cliff where you'll exceed what Amplify was designed to do and then find yourself in the pit of despair where you've now provisioned a bunch of AWS services, Amplify can't help you solve the case that you need because you've gone off the beaten path, and you've just been hurled into the sea of services that were configured by a robot that you've never seen before and you have to figure out how to back that out and work through it.

What draws me to Netlify and services in the Netlify space is that we're not trying to say, “We'll push the buttons for you, and then when you're ready, they're your buttons.” We're saying, “Let's not think about those buttons” -- the same way that the vast majority of us aren't thinking about the fact that, when we push a button on our keyboard, an electrical impulse is being sent through a wire to the motherboard and that puts a character on the screen. We don't have to think about that. We just push the keys and we type to our friends and we're searching things on the internet.

We want infrastructure for modern websites to feel the same way. We want it to just disappear as an implementation detail, because you don't need to care that you are using containers or an S3 bucket versus an Azure web storage instance or whatever that is. You should care that you've got files accessible in a performant way. You should care that you've got access to things like serverless functions and not necessarily how those serverless functions are configured or routed or scaled, but just that they work, and we'll scale up if you need more and if you don't want to scale up, you can set the limits in your account -- all those things that you want to do to make sure that your website performs as it should. But we don't want those implementation details to be a thing that you ever really need to worry about.

That's a design choice that we make. The trade-off is that, on AWS, they will happily send you off into the whole AWS ecosystem and say, “Yeah, whatever you can figure out, you can build.” With Netlify, what we say is, “Well, you've exceeded what Netlify can do built-in. Here's a way that you can go get those other services and wire them into Netlify.” But we're not going to take the Netlify wrapper off and say, “Here, go do whatever you want,” because in our opinion, that's not a productive way to solve that problem.