Corey Quinn

When I wrote about turning down an AWS job offer I had a whole bunch of people ranging from “multiple VPs” to “remarkably senior managers / engineers / contributors” to “aggrieved ex-employees” all come out of the woodwork to explain their perspective as to how AWS approaches paying people. I’ve been keeping notes on everything […]

If you look across the vast landscape of AWS services through a lens of billing, a pattern begins to emerge. There are of course the usual collection of billing jokes. You’re not charged for what you use, but for what you forget to turn off. Your AWS bill is a function of how many engineers […]

(Full credit to Alice Goldfuss for the absolutely incredible title.) So, AWS booted Parler off of their service on the grounds that “calling for the assassination of elected officials was well outside the bounds of AWS’s acceptable use policy,” and half of the internet is suddenly an expert on reverse cloud migrations. I’m going to […]

AWS Data Transfer billing is, to understate massively, arcane. At a high level: Data transfer inbound is free. Data transfer to the internet costs a larger pile of money. Data transfer between availability zones within a region costs a pile of money (usually 2¢ per GB in the “main” regions, but costs can spike way […]

One of my favorite things to do at the end of the year is dive into a bit of writing code myself. I’m incredibly bad at it, which—while frustrating from an execution perspective—makes posts like this way more entertaining. My lingua franca is “Python.” This shouldn’t shouldn’t be misconstrued as me saying, “I’m good at […]

By far the most notable release of re:Invent this year was gp3 EBS volumes. They offer a flat 20% discount from gp2 volumes with no drawbacks and can be done in place. Today, I’d like to explore a little bit more about what makes these so awesome. Let’s start by calling out what EBS volumes […]

Over the past year, I’ve been asked a question somewhat frequently, and in a variety of differently articulated forms that all distill down to this: “So is ECS in maintenance mode now that Kubernetes won?” There is so much wrong with that sentiment that I felt compelled to write about it this week and pick […]

I’m seeing something deeply disturbing about AWS that I didn’t recognize at first until I viewed it through the lens of Google. This is such a pervasive and impactful problem that I feel compelled to discuss it in terms Amazon themselves would: the Amazon Leadership Principles. I decided to Learn and Be Curious, and what […]

We’re currently hiring a content writer to write additional things here at Last Week in AWS. Our writing prompt for the role asks the applicant to write a small piece about what the most under-appreciated AWS service is. Here’s my submission. The AWS billing system Everyone appreciates (or at least fears) S3, DynamoDB, EC2, and […]

At the Duckbill Group, we spend a lot of time on AWS Contract Negotiation. Something that’s become very clear to us as we’ve gone through our client engagements is that companies shouldn’t let AWS contracts dictate their architectural decisions—and yet, most of them do on some level. This behavior takes a variety of forms depending […]

AWS recently launched the AWS Gateway Load Balancer. Technically, it’s a way of preserving original network traffic/ensuring flow symmetry—or, in other words, “dropping a bunch of instances in-line without having to teach them all about AWS networking.” This is a great feature! What’s not so great is that the launch article highlights how good this […]

Why AWS Announces Regions in Advance Generally, AWS doesn’t pre-announce things years in advance. When they do, it’s usually a misstep—such as with Timestream’s GA being two years after its announcement. A notable exception to this policy is geographic expansion of AWS regions. Last week, AWS pre-announced a new region in Zurich, with an eye […]