The AWS Survival Guide for 2025: A Field Manual for the Brave and the Bankrupt

Welcome to Build re:Invent Next! The lights go down. It’s time for your preferred cloud vendor’s annual keynote to start. An inspiring video plays to what was charitably deemed “corporate dance music” but in practice sounds like a sped-up Enya on quaaludes. Satya / Andy / a robot walks on stage to welcome us all […]

There’s something going on over at Oracle Cloud, and I think the industry is missing it entirely in favor of the easy “Oracle sucks” narrative. There’s a change afoot, and I have a sneaking suspicion of what it might be. True, Oracle Cloud is a popular target for derision and mockery—and who could blame anyone? […]

When we talk about vendor lock-in, one of the most common stories we see is one of databases. The database you pick to hold your data is something you’re going to be using for a good long while; migrations are painful, expensive, time-consuming, and—in some cases —barely possible. Amazon themselves ran on top of Oracle […]

This week’s analysis on multi-cloud being a bad idea is once again pushed back by breaking news. In this case, AWS is suing a former executive, Brian Hall, under his non-compete agreement. I’ve covered my thoughts on non-compete agreements in the past—it was the driver behind my decision to decline an AWS job offer several […]

As a Cloud Economist, I spend most of my time helping companies fix their horrifying AWS bills. But it’s something of an open secret that I periodically moonlight as an industry analyst. An analysis client recently asked me about the threat of AWS moving into their market as a strategic concern, and couldn’t understand at […]

People like to ask me the same question: How do you keep up with AWS service and feature releases? I get it almost as frequently as what the hell is wrong with you? It’s a fun question, and today I’d like to take a stab at answering it in a format that goes beyond “a […]

Amazon Kendra feels like a lost opportunity to onboard AWS customers of a different stripe.

Azure’s capacity issues cast a pall over public cloud that extends well beyond just Microsoft.

Updated: May 1, 2020. See the bottom of this article for some clarifications. Today, news broke that Zoom signed a deal with Oracle Cloud to host their cloud infrastructure, beating out AWS, Azure, and GCP. You might expect that this is about to be a post full of Oracle bashing. You’re about to be disappointed. […]

There are few things less satisfying than when you set up to dunk on a Google product, but discover it’s unexpectedly awesome.

AWS’s free tier was imagined as a no-risk way to test out AWS services before building meaningful infrastructure on the platform. The reality has become something very different.

Twitter asked a bunch of questions about the AWS bill; I took it upon myself to respond to a selection of them.