AWS’s (de)Generative AI Blunder

How AWS makes its billions — $13 billion in operating income in 2020 alone — to support the bulk of Amazon’s net income is a question that stumps the public. To shine some light on the topic, CNBC’s Jordan Novet published an article on AWS’ estimated margins on a per-service basis. Amazon obviously isn’t publishing […]

Periodically I get someone excited to talk to me about their new AWS bill optimization tool. This is the shorthand “cheat sheet” that addresses how I think about these things. It looks like you’re building a SaaS tool to manage AWS cost optimization. I don’t think it will work. Here’s why I don’t think it […]

The cloud wars are getting a lot more interesting this week. A Cloud Guru’s senior director of content and community, AWS Serverless Hero, and friend of this newsletter (“Aaaah! DON’T CALL ME THAT! DON’T EVER CALL ME THAT!”) Forrest Brazeal has announced that he’s accepted a role as Google Cloud’s head of content. This has […]

If you’ve taken the Cloud Resume Challenge, it’s reasonable to assume that you’re looking to start a career in the world of cloud computing. Congratulations or condolences, to your preference. There’s a good chance that in hopes of snaring your next great job, you’ve built a portfolio website on top of AWS to show off […]

Not all cloud customers are the same, but there seems to be a lack of awareness of this in the industry. Let me sketch out two customer personas for you. Customer A is a SaaS company. They run their environment on the cloud in some way: Perhaps it’s all-in-on one provider, perhaps it’s multi-cloud (which […]

More and more providers are offering free cloud databases, which give you a certain amount of free storage and throughput. Don’t mistake a free database for generosity — this is a sales tactic.

As far as conferences go, AWS re:Invent is certainly notable. It’s the absolute center of the Cloud World for a week each year in Las Vegas. But given the physical and virtual split for this year’s conference, I started mulling over: What is re:Invent at its heart? AWS calls re:Invent an “educational conference.” Given how […]

Data processing pipelines have ever-growing requirements for speed and throughput. It’s no longer enough to store data and save it to batch processing at some future time. We need to be able to process data in real time to make snap decisions and get immediate insights.

The biggest mistakes we ever find in software are written by the worst developer imaginable: the past version of yourself. “If I’d known then what I know now, I’d have built that thing completely differently” is a common refrain, and not just for individual coders. So it goes for cloud providers, who are forced to […]

Be wary of the ways Amazon is running its retail business; it’s starting to leach into AWS.

There are certain things I don’t want a discount on — a quality parachute, for example. But when it comes to cloud computing, discounted services are usually identical to the regularly priced ones. So why not take advantage? Since the marginal cost of supplying cloud services is low, AWS doesn’t mind offering credits or discounts […]

There’s a universal lie that technical people believe across the board. It goes something like this: “After this next sprint ends, then we’re going to pay off all of our technical debt and start doing everything the right way.”