AWS’s (de)Generative AI Blunder

Last week, someone behind the @AmazonNews Twitter account took a fistful of pills, washed them down with a handle of Old Grand-Dad, and started tweeting. They picked fights with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. They also argued with Wisconsin’s congressional Representative Mark Pocan. And while all of this is embarrassing and highly cringey, my problem […]

A recurring theme has arisen recently: I find myself wishing for a version of an AWS service that charged me less in return for being actively worse at what it did. This isn’t me hoping for a Chaos Engineering region that breaks intentionally so I can shore up my application’s durability. Instead, it’s me wishing […]

…and I assure you, I’m no happier about it than you likely are. Basically, all new developers use VScode (or better, its in-browser equivalent GitHub Codespaces), a Microsoft product. They write code of varying quality and then stuff into GitHub, a Microsoft product. If they’re lucky / unfortunate enough to have a production environment, they’ll […]

With my bizarre re:Invent lounge pass (read as: Cloud Practitioner Certification) expiring later this year, it behooves me to take another AWS certification exam to keep the lounge goodies flowing. This year I opted for the “beta” Sysops Administrator Associate exam. I give it the scare quotes around “beta” because—when you’re charging people money (in […]

I begin this week with an admission. A while back, I opined on Twitter that a site I ran, stop.lying.cloud, was unacceptably slow. To save you a click, that site retrieves the AWS status page, applies some transforms to clean up part of the “endless sea of green,” and returns the result. It did this […]

“There is no story about AWS that can’t be awkwardly and ineffectively rebutted in the most unsympathetic way possible.”

AWS does a terrible job at marketing their products to users. We know how to fix it.

A primer on the history of AWS, how it developed, why it’s been so transformative, and how it’s easy to make fun of.

Discussing the impact of the Elastic decision to relicense its open source software to a proprietary SSPL license.

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 […]