AWS’s (de)Generative AI Blunder

I suggest that serverless computing, or “serverless” has hype that at this point has outpaced what the technology / philosophy / religion has been promising. Serverless computing arrived (debatably; please do not email me about this whatever you do, fans of Google App Engine / CGI scripts / managed SaaS offerings / pedants) with something […]

Lambda is growing rapidly in popularity as a compute platform. After delegating a whole range of operational decisions to AWS, we are free, we’re told, to focus on our application logic while AWS tries to make the supporting machinery as transparent as possible. Until that all goes away because the execution role was deleted and […]

Let’s talk about the dumbest dollars a cloud provider can possibly make. No, I’m not talking about data egress or the Managed NAT Gateway data processing fee; those are rent-seeking behaviors that embody Day 2 thinking. I’m talking about the dumbest money — the kind where cloud providers step over dollars to pick up pennies. […]

Today, I want to talk about TurboTax. Yes, while Intuit is a longstanding AWS reference customer, I’m not here to talk about its cloud bills. Instead, I’m going to apply its consumer tax product to how I think about AWS bill savings. For readers who aren’t in the United States or familiar with the way […]

Object storage is a form of cloud storage designed to keep huge amounts of data, which is split into a pool of objects and uses metadata for organization.

It’s been three years since I turned down an attractive job offer at AWS because of the required noncompete agreement. Frankly, I still don’t have any regrets about the decision as Amazon piles on. Since this article was originally published in August 2019, a lot has happened: AWS sued Brian Hall in 2020 under the […]

Once upon a time, file storage meant your filing cabinet. In some ways, today’s file storage is very different — and in others, it hasn’t changed at all. File storage is a system for keeping data in an organized hierarchy of files and folders. You can share that hierarchy across a network, so multiple people […]

Cloudflare announced its own object storage offering last week, snarkily naming it “R2” instead of AWS’ “S3.” Storage is great, but let’s tie it to cloud economics here. We don’t have specifics as to edge case pricing dimensions, but Cloudflare’s blog post goes into some detail about how it works. First, it charges a rate […]

Block storage is a low-level technology that underpins the majority of modern storage — including whatever device you’re reading this on. It divides data into small units called “blocks,” which provide fast and flexible ways to manage data. It’s ideal for local storage and high-performance workloads. This is the first article in a three-part series […]

Everyone says that the next million cloud customers are coming from enterprise IT. It’s the narrative that all of the major cloud platforms have been saying for a while — to the point that I started accepting it uncritically. I even recently wrote about those next million enterprise IT customers. Oof. No! That’s not how […]

Years ago, I founded a company that built iPhone apps. And those apps needed web services.  Back in 2009, that meant you ordered rack-mounted servers at Dell, carried them into your local data center for colocation, and managed them by hand or through automation tools like Ansible. I vividly remember spending nights restoring crashed servers […]

It started as a meme, but it turned into a real post on “The 17 Ways to Run Containers on AWS.” Apparently my list continues to be a source of amusement inside of AWS. Given that I do prefer to give the people what they want, I’d like to talk about 17 more ways to […]