For every five (5) retweets this tweet gets, I will add an Uncomfortable Cloud Industry Truth to this thread. Let's begin...
"We're fully redundant across AZs, regions, and even cloud providers!" crows the engineer with a single corporate credit card backing the entire house of cards.
Sudoku is a fun logic puzzle that stretches your mental faculties, but it doesn't solve any real issues; nobody NEEDS the numbers in the grid correctly. This is of course an allegory for Kubernetes.
In the South, "bless your heart" means to go to hell. The same sentiment couched in friendly terms in tech is when an engineer making $300K a year tells you to submit a pull request to their employer's codebase.
An awful lot of cloud advertising is a company spending a lifetime's salary to get everyone's attention, and then say nothing interesting whatsoever.
"If all the other kids jumped off a cliff, would you?"
Don't lie. You absolutely would if @gartner_inc put out a Cliff Jumping Magic Quadrant.
Don't lie. You absolutely would if @gartner_inc put out a Cliff Jumping Magic Quadrant.
The greatest myth across the entire industry is that after this sprint we're all going to start making good technical decisions instead.
One genie that won't get stuffed back into the bottle anytime soon is all of the engineers figuring out just how little money it takes to have *GOOD* keyboards, desks, chairs, and snacks.
AI/ML is clearly the future of technology. It's entirely coincidental that the people pushing it the hardest sell compute and storage by the pound.
"The cloud is just someone else's computer" is technically true, but most of us don't want to sign a three year contract, buy servers, and arrange for maintenance before we can put up our twitterforpets.com nonsense websites.
Various vendor cloud conferences generally cost between $20 million - $200 million by rough estimate.
Roughly $40 of that is apparently spent on public speaker training.
Roughly $40 of that is apparently spent on public speaker training.
It's disturbing how much of the Cloud industry involves finding brilliant people, hurling obscene amounts of money at them, and then making them spend hours a week on administrative tasks because assistants are only for Directors and up.
I think the "@awscloud is going to crush you into the dirt" hype is overblown, but maybe think twice before building an entire startup around "fixing an obnoxious but easily patched CloudFormation behavior."
My first Lambda function took me two weeks to build because I'm bad at programming.
My latest Lambda function took me three minutes to build because I'm bad at programming and don't know what tests are.
My latest Lambda function took me three minutes to build because I'm bad at programming and don't know what tests are.
It turns out that "mocking cloud services" doesn't mean what I've thought it did for the last four years, and I owe @awscloud, @azure, and @googlecloud massive apologies.
One of the things I miss the most about in-person interactions is visiting @awscloud buildings and watching maybe 1 person in 10 do a double-take when they figure out just why I look so familiar.
Any DR plan that has "@awscloud is globally down for at least weeks" generally fails to account for their engineering staff recognizing a multi-million dollar consulting opportunity when it slaps them in the face.
Reddit's /r/vxjunkies is a sneak peek of the next ML keynote at re:Invent (AWS’s own version of Cloud Next).
I've never understood why @intel advertises at all of the cloud provider conferences.
With their recent roadmap adjustments and the rise of Arm, I understand it far less, now. "Intel Inside" has taken on a darker implication...
With their recent roadmap adjustments and the rise of Arm, I understand it far less, now. "Intel Inside" has taken on a darker implication...
None of this stuff is easy. All of it is hard.
But you don't get to bill people extortionately and then expect them to only say nice things about you.
But you don't get to bill people extortionately and then expect them to only say nice things about you.
Some of the best services cloud providers offer never get mentioned during a keynote.
When's the last time SQS failed you?
When's the last time SQS failed you?
Ever notice that people are way more self-satisfied about an additional 3% discount on their cloud negotiations than they are are about turning off the 20% of their environment that's been going to waste?
Most of what the cloud providers do is uniformly excellent, but we sure do harp on the missing bits.
You'd think @awscloud had kicked my dog while mispronouncing AMI the way I carry on...
You'd think @awscloud had kicked my dog while mispronouncing AMI the way I carry on...
I feel like if the right person at AWS spoke to the right customer, a lot of problems would magically go away.
But first I have to introduce that person to other @awscloud employees instead.
But first I have to introduce that person to other @awscloud employees instead.
Every time a cloud provider does a "how to analyze your bill" post that casually mentions spinning up $750 in infrastructure to do it, I make it a point to check the Seattle police blotter the following week.
Did you know that you can have more than one @awscloud account?
I only ask because it seems some service teams remain unaware of this.
I only ask because it seems some service teams remain unaware of this.
Build an @awscloud environment and ignore it for three years, the infrastructure powering it becomes more reliable and likely cheaper.
But you'll get yelled at for not following their newer best practices guidance when you get back.
But you'll get yelled at for not following their newer best practices guidance when you get back.
Azure has a lot of good things going for it, but their marketing of "it's 5x more expensive to run SQL server on AWS" as if that were due to any reason other than their own licensing terms is infuriating.
If you talked to people the way that Marketing talks to people, you'd get punched in the face before lunchtime.
Sometimes I'm tempted to make up a fake @awscloud service and see who calls me on it.
So far nobody has, and my book on Systems Manager API Manager goes up for preorder next week.
So far nobody has, and my book on Systems Manager API Manager goes up for preorder next week.
"Our rivals HATE us but they still use our product because they can't migrate off of it to save their lives!" is the kind of thing that sounds better in your head than it does on a keynote stage.
I'd be less of an ML skeptic with a solid "this is how it transformed our entire business for the better" customer story.
So far all we've got is "it taught us people like to drink coffee in the morning," "helping the feds commit atrocities," and "bias laundering."
So far all we've got is "it taught us people like to drink coffee in the morning," "helping the feds commit atrocities," and "bias laundering."
The fact that there's an @awscloud product called "Snowball Edge" tells me both that "checking Urban Dictionary before shipping" isn't a thing there, and that someone there has an incredible poker face that could own half of Las Vegas.
Today's a great day to arrest the cops who murdered Breonna Taylor.
No snark in this tweet. Freaking do it already!
No snark in this tweet. Freaking do it already!
Microsoft @Azure has a new thing where they use hydrogen fuel cells to power a datacenter.
The pictures they posted have scary enough explosive warnings that a failure mode might outshine us-east-1.
The pictures they posted have scary enough explosive warnings that a failure mode might outshine us-east-1.
A couple of years ago I got a polite employment overture from @gartner_inc.
Just imagine for a second what that Magic Quadrant would have looked like.
Just imagine for a second what that Magic Quadrant would have looked like.
Remember, there is no IBM Cloud, it's just somebody else's abacus.
"Amazon prides itself on listening to customers" probably sounded a lot better before Alexa started shipping.
Google Cloud would be the best cloud in the world by a landslide if you could somehow mandate that everyone wrote code like a Google software engineer.
I tried to deploy a Serverless function I found on Github the other day and it kept breaking.
"This version of Node is no longer supported" and suddenly I felt ancient.
"This version of Node is no longer supported" and suddenly I felt ancient.
Now that we're all working remotely, the line between "hands on manager" and "full time internet troll" grows dangerously thin.
🎵TAKE ME DOWN TO IoT CITY
WHERE THE HOUSES ARE HAUNTED
AND THE LOCKS ARE SHITTY 🎶
WHERE THE HOUSES ARE HAUNTED
AND THE LOCKS ARE SHITTY 🎶
"Why don't you write newsletters for the other cloud providers?"
Why don't YOU? I'd sign up.
Why don't YOU? I'd sign up.
"We're willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time" lands better in Amazon's investor letter than it does as a banner over @awscloud Marketing.
If you sign up for my webinar I'll give you $100 in Canadian Tire money. It's no less ridiculous than bribing you with @awscloud credits, but somehow we've all been hoodwinked into thinking it is.
If you pay me $150, I'll tell anyone who asks that you're awesome at a technology of your choice.
That sounds SUPER sketchy unless I call it a certification.
That sounds SUPER sketchy unless I call it a certification.
When my extended family asks me what I do for a living, I lie my ass off. Can you imagine?!
SimpleDB isn't dead. You can still use it. The team periodically hires software engineers.
I'd always thought you were exiled to that team if you were on a PIP or something...
I'd always thought you were exiled to that team if you were on a PIP or something...
We sent a human to the moon with billions of times less computing power than it takes @awscloud to send one to collections.
Soon enough the pandemic will end and you can stop telecommuting from home to your cloud resources and go back to telecommuting from your office to your cloud resources instead.
Cloud computing didn't become possible at scale until 2010, when @msexcel supported more than 65536 rows per spreadsheet.
My cloud news coverage is psychotic.
Cloud vendor news coverage is less exciting than tax forms.
You'd really, really think there would be a middle ground somewhere, but there isn't.
Cloud vendor news coverage is less exciting than tax forms.
You'd really, really think there would be a middle ground somewhere, but there isn't.
It's free to send data into cloud providers, it costs an arm and a leg to retrieve it.
There are surprising end runs around this that are uniformly terrible--yet effective.
There are surprising end runs around this that are uniformly terrible--yet effective.
It's Tuesday night. Since Monday morning the 40 official @awscloud RSS feeds have put out 51 items.
If you're having trouble keeping up, it's not just you. I built a 29 Lambda function monstrosity to do it.
If you're having trouble keeping up, it's not just you. I built a 29 Lambda function monstrosity to do it.
AWS tries to shove six months of releases into a week at re:Invent (AWS’s own version of Cloud Next). Google took their releases and spread Cloud Next across 9 weeks.
Meanwhile Azure pivoted to telling stories well on video.
Meanwhile Azure pivoted to telling stories well on video.
My biggest regret for not having an in-person conference this year is watching @awscloud's chutzpah in offering both a service named "Simple Queueing" and a 45 minute line for the shuttle bus.
Cloud data breaches are a great opportunity for companies to tell us how much security matters to them as they fervently hope we disregard the crystal clear evidence to the contrary.
Speaking of @awscloud security, between the per-gigabyte ingest charges for Macie, GuardDuty, and Detective my cost per GB is now higher with AWS than it is with Verizon Wireless.
If @awscloud ever asks you to implement QuickSort on a whiteboard, the only correct answer is to respond with "sure, right after you implement it on your services page."
Route 53 isn't really a database, but neither is MongoDB.
If you ever speak at re:Invent (AWS’s own version of Cloud Next), @awscloud has people who go through your slides to ensure you call services by their proper names ("AWS" vs "Amazon").
Because that's the confusing part about AWS services.
Because that's the confusing part about AWS services.
I once left a P3 instance running by mistake. In hindsight, I wish it had been the oven instead.
I'm not sure which is worse: security vendors who try to make your entire posture look like application security, or the security vendors who try to make your cloud environment look like a mediocre datacenter architecture from 1998.
I feel like we're always only about 2 down quarters away from @awscloud support attempting to upsell me a credit card while they've got me on the phone.
"The beauty of @awscloud Lambda is that we handle scaling; you don't have to think about it!"
Then approve my request for 4.3 billion concurrent functions so I can portscan the entire ipv4 internet at once, you cowards.
Then approve my request for 4.3 billion concurrent functions so I can portscan the entire ipv4 internet at once, you cowards.
A great litmus test for which cloud providers will excel is to grab one of their engineers and request the most preposterous thing you can possibly imagine.
Their response will tell you a lot about how suited they are to servicing enterprise customers.
Their response will tell you a lot about how suited they are to servicing enterprise customers.
"There's no compression algorithm for experience" should be viewed with suspicion and distrust coming from someone who charges for storage by the gigabyte.
AWS could instead charge for storage by weight. The gigabyte/pound would not be the most bizarre and impossible to calculate pricing dimension by a wide margin.
If you build a great cloud tech startup, Microsoft will attempt to buy you and trip themselves up, Google will attempt to buy and then deprecate you, and AWS will launch a competitor with a stupid name and a piss-weak marketing narrative.
Go build. The world's your oyster.
Go build. The world's your oyster.
"If you had asked the customer what they wanted, they'd have said 'faster horses.'"
It's not enough to just ask; you've gotta ask the right questions, and then you've gotta listen, as the GM of AWS Foster Horse can now attest.
It's not enough to just ask; you've gotta ask the right questions, and then you've gotta listen, as the GM of AWS Foster Horse can now attest.
Now that there's a service that can talk to satellites (AWS Ground Station), I'm super optimistic about an @awscloud service that one day can talk to other accounts within the same AWS Organization.
Show me your cloud bill, I'll show you who you are.
If you're spending $10 million a month on EC2, you're probably serving customers at a global scale.
If you're spending $10 million a month on DeepRacer, you're probably touched in the head.
If you're spending $10 million a month on EC2, you're probably serving customers at a global scale.
If you're spending $10 million a month on DeepRacer, you're probably touched in the head.
If you want to work at a cloud provider but suck at whiteboard interviews, have you tried deploying Kubernetes instead?
The greatest trick the cloud vendors ever pulled was getting us to spend this kind of time, effort, and energy on learning the ins and outs of everything they do, and then pay them for the privilege.
Writing a bash script that forcibly checks git out into production is dangerous and irresponsible.
Unless you call it CI/CD.
Unless you call it CI/CD.
There are remarkably few cloud services that can’t be press ganged into serving as a crappy database.
Old and busted: figuring out whether it’s safe to turn off that ancient server.
New hotness: figuring out whether that 4 petabyte S3 bucket is load bearing.
New hotness: figuring out whether that 4 petabyte S3 bucket is load bearing.
2015: using GoFundMe to pay your @awscloud bill.
2020: Raising a Series C from SoftBank to pay your multi-cloud bill.
2020: Raising a Series C from SoftBank to pay your multi-cloud bill.
Sure, "it's always Day One" is fine when @awscloud says it, but when you say it when presented with a NET30 invoice suddenly "that's not what they meant at all" and "pay up before we take this to arbitration."
Cloud can seem hard and confusing and more than a little daunting, but with just eight short months of engineering effort you can get your environment up and running just in time for them to release a service that would have cut seven months off of your cloud journey.
The beauty of cloud is in its elasticity. It lets you scale up to meet traffic demands, and then when that traffic wanes you can keep your scaled up environment running in perpetuity to help send some engineers' kids to college.
Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, but it's pretty clear someone at IBM's going to get fired for buying Red Hat.
"How do we hire someone like Corey to work in our marketing department?"
"That's easy. The hard part is building a corporate culture where his mouth doesn't get him fired by lunchtime."
"That's easy. The hard part is building a corporate culture where his mouth doesn't get him fired by lunchtime."
Cloud providers love to build the digital equivalent of precision screwdriver sets, which I then insult on Twitter because they're really crappy hammers.
"Burning down the building for the insurance money" will gain new life this decade as "accidentally delete the data warehouse so we don't have to migrate it between providers."
The 10GB Cost and Usage report on @awscloud costs you $2.30 a month just to store it in S3.
Not all indignities are massive; sometimes it's the small things.
Not all indignities are massive; sometimes it's the small things.
It turns out that as far as cloud cost savings proposals go, "consider alternate storage tiers" gets more customer adoption than "fire your data science team immediately."
VMware is still the payday lender of technical debt.
Vendors LOVE to complain about how awful the big cloud providers are. Be sure to stop by and listen to them do so at the expo booth they paid that provider $200K for.
Every cloud provider offers at least a hundred different services.
It seems that maybe I shouldn't need the equivalent of an associates degree in their offerings to launch the first version of twitterforpets.com...
It seems that maybe I shouldn't need the equivalent of an associates degree in their offerings to launch the first version of twitterforpets.com...
On-prem shops may eventually face a talent shortage. It's hard to go backwards from "spinning up 10K instances to chew on a problem" to "driving to the data center at 3AM to replace a failed hard drive," y'know?
"Read an encyclopedia's worth of documentation, get a bunch of training and certs, hire a partner to help, watch a bunch of videos, read 30K words of blog posts a week, and keep learning!" seems like an awful lot of customer legwork to make up for poor cloud provider UX.
COVID19 has done more to further your company's digital transformation than the last dozen CIOs.
We used to see cloud providers compete amongst their respective companies.
Now we're seeing CloudFormation, SAM, and the CDK starting to take out attack ads against one another.
Now we're seeing CloudFormation, SAM, and the CDK starting to take out attack ads against one another.
"S3 went down for six hours a couple of years ago so we're going to keep running on-premises so we have better durability" is a half-step away from "plug the power strip into itself for infinite power" thinking.
Most companies' cloud bills don't really track their customer numbers very closely.
They track their engineering headcount super well, though.
They track their engineering headcount super well, though.
Remember the kids who were WAY too into catching and naming all of the various Pokémon?
They work at the @CloudNativeFdn now.
They work at the @CloudNativeFdn now.
Speaking of, the @CloudNativeFdn is really, really, really, really hoping I forgot about my livestreamed CFP submission for Kubecon.
I didn't.
I didn't.
I mean, I have no earthly idea how this is going to turn into a talk, but I have faith in my ability to pull salient points from pure chaos.
...but it's possible I may have painted myself into a corner.
I once asked an @awscloud S3 PM if it was theoretically possible to fill S3 in a region, assuming budget wasn't a factor.
"Hah, I don't think you could--wait. Why are you asking?" You could hear the exact instant where they remembered to whom they were speaking.
"Hah, I don't think you could--wait. Why are you asking?" You could hear the exact instant where they remembered to whom they were speaking.
Relatedly: since shaming companies for open S3 buckets doesn't seem to be working, I'll now be looking for open write permissions instead.
You can ignore a polite email from me; let's see if you can ignore a $6 million Surprise Bill.
You can ignore a polite email from me; let's see if you can ignore a $6 million Surprise Bill.
They're not really a "cloud company," but I just fed a picture of @Facebook's board into Amazon Comprehend and it was such a white space it rendered as valid YAML.
“You’re fun on Twitter, but there’s no way you could actually be anything like this in a professional setting.”
Wanna bet?
Wanna bet?
Times are tough; if the conference goes virtual this year they may have to downsize to the re:Invent Apartment Band instead.
