<story><title>Dear AWS, please let me be a cloud engineer again</title><url>https://lucvandonkersgoed.com/2024/07/13/dear-aws-please-let-me-be-a-cloud-engineer-again/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cperciva</author><text>AWS is way too bandwagonny these days.  Back when it was all engineers they built things on the basis of &amp;quot;this is cool technology&amp;quot;.  These days marketing runs large parts of AWS and plans are decided more on the basis of &amp;quot;this will look cool on a PowerPoint slide&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I keep going back to the basics: Serverless is servers.  Machine learning is servers.  GenAI is servers.  And, from what I&amp;#x27;ve heard, most of AWS revenue is servers and storage.&lt;p&gt;(For the record: I am also an AWS Hero, and an AWS customer since 2006.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chipdart</author><text>&amp;gt; AWS is way too bandwagonny these days. Back when it was all engineers they built things on the basis of &amp;quot;this is cool technology&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t agree. I think AWS has always been extremely customer-focused, and they scramble to offer whatever service might have any traction at all from customers. It&amp;#x27;s just that they are already providing the low-level baseline services, and now they are progressing to offer increasingly higher-level ones.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m talking about machine learning-driven firewalls, backend for mobile applications, video streaming, edge computing, even Blockchain and now LLM services.&lt;p&gt;As much as it might surprise you, there is plenty of real-world demand for these services. You might accuse it of being &amp;quot;bandwagonny&amp;quot;, but if you take an objective look at it you&amp;#x27;ll find that they are playing the role of supply store owners during the gold rush. It comes at no surprise that AWS is the one part of Amazon whose revenue is growing massively year-on-year, with the last report pointing to a 17% growth year over year.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.cnbc.com&amp;#x2F;2024&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;30&amp;#x2F;aws-q1-earnings-report-2024.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.cnbc.com&amp;#x2F;2024&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;30&amp;#x2F;aws-q1-earnings-report-2024....&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is that what you would call bandwagonny?</text></comment>
<story><title>Dear AWS, please let me be a cloud engineer again</title><url>https://lucvandonkersgoed.com/2024/07/13/dear-aws-please-let-me-be-a-cloud-engineer-again/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cperciva</author><text>AWS is way too bandwagonny these days.  Back when it was all engineers they built things on the basis of &amp;quot;this is cool technology&amp;quot;.  These days marketing runs large parts of AWS and plans are decided more on the basis of &amp;quot;this will look cool on a PowerPoint slide&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I keep going back to the basics: Serverless is servers.  Machine learning is servers.  GenAI is servers.  And, from what I&amp;#x27;ve heard, most of AWS revenue is servers and storage.&lt;p&gt;(For the record: I am also an AWS Hero, and an AWS customer since 2006.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Twirrim</author><text>&amp;gt; most of AWS revenue is servers and storage&lt;p&gt;The way that cloud businesses work, you sell the servers for about as cheap as you possibly can do.  Instance prices are all a race to the bottom among the providers, because servers are largely commodity hardware that&amp;#x27;s easy to get from any number of providers, and it&amp;#x27;s one of the first prices customers see, and often plays a big role in their choice of provider.&lt;p&gt;So that&amp;#x27;s not where you make your profits.  So you&amp;#x27;re right, lots of revenue, but crucially, there is no real profit.  There never will be.  That makes it a boring product, not worth focusing a lot on from a marketing perspective etc.
Same tends to go for all of what you might think of as the basic building blocks of the cloud.  e.g. object storage prices are often really close to what it actually costs to provide the service.&lt;p&gt;You make your profits on what you sell that runs &lt;i&gt;on&lt;/i&gt; the cloud.  All those additional things like databases, streaming services, kubernetes bits, functions  etc.  Those are where you make your actual profits.  GenAI is a big potential profit driver for AWS, so that&amp;#x27;s where they&amp;#x27;re pushing.   A couple of years ago it was &amp;quot;$foo, but on Kubernetes&amp;quot;.  Before that it was &amp;quot;$foo, but Serverless&amp;quot;.
They&amp;#x27;re just pushing where the profit and interest is, and pretty much always have done.&lt;p&gt;sort of side-note:  Gartner&amp;#x27;s evaluation of cloud providers got really absurd around kubernetes stuff.  Because one cloud would do it, you&amp;#x27;d miss out on points if &lt;i&gt;you&lt;/i&gt; didn&amp;#x27;t also add it, even if being on kubernetes literally added zero benefit, or arguably was worse.  Same for &amp;quot;Serverless&amp;quot;.  It didn&amp;#x27;t matter if customers were actually using it, or wanted it, if AWS&amp;#x2F;Azure&amp;#x2F;GCP launched it, you&amp;#x27;d better have it too.</text></comment>