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Corey Quinn Profile picture
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3 Feb, 21 tweets, 7 min read
Actual Amazonians can't say anything on the record obviously, but as the self-appointed head of @awscloud marketing I can.

Ask me anything about AWS and I'll come up with a halfway plausible answer.
Operational excellence and the tears of the damned.
Data transfer pricing at scale, makes networking people feel at home, more deterministic performance, and you can blame it when you want to go take a nap in the data center.
Functionally it's a combination of getting the intellectual shit kicked out of you by Ken Jennings while simultaneously disappointing your overbearing father.
Because it solves a problem that the other options don't solve, or don't solve as well.

There's a vast range as far as how cynical you can be when identifying those problems.
It's a transient idea, because it only exists for the duration of your cloud migration.

But you'll screw that up and be in "Hybrid" for the next fourteen years, so you may as well get comfortable.
Generally with someone else's cost center, or at least their credit card.
Then you'll have to pay the piper instead.
No, I absolutely can not.
We have bets riding on the CNCF.
We'd have to run surveys to determine the most universally beloved, of course. Lambda, DynamoDB, the management console...
Yes. The real question is "voluntarily?"
Not unless you REALLY pick and choose which services you're bolting together, no.
My method is honestly to build something. You'll learn as you go. Don't put sensitive data into it unless someone else reviews it first.
Buy a lot of Savings Plan upfront 3 year commitments, used Managed NAT gateways, send data between regions a lot. Then you'll be charged millions of dollars instead.
It gives you the capacity you need, 20 minutes after you needed it.
Because it's not actually tied to us. It's run by some hit operation that wants it to look like they're acting in our name.

Alternately, someone in my org needs to be fired immediately.
Yes, for values of "the same thing" that include "getting their asses handed to them by Snowflake."
"Effectively" sure is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

On a serious note, customers have different interaction models; we try to accommodate them.
Because we have bolted it securely to the ground with cords of Amazon.com UX.
Because they're worth it.

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More from @QuinnyPig

Corey Quinn Profile picture
5 Feb
So a thread I've been "meaning to write" for the past few years but somehow always found an excuse to avoid. No more!

My entire career (and life, really) have been shaped by ADHD. The key was finally emphasizing for things I'm good at, while avoiding the things that I'm bad at.
ADHD is a spectrum disorder. Different people have different expressions of it. This is how it affects me; I've never met someone else who had it affect them quite this way.
An analogy that stuck with me is "everyone has to hold 100 marbles at once, but they all have a bag and you don't." Medication gives you a bag with a hole in it. You still drop marbles from time to time, but it's so much better than not having one at all.
Read 21 tweets
Corey Quinn Profile picture
4 Feb
So story time! We optimize AWS bills-and sometimes that includes negotiating @awscloud contracts on behalf of our customers. This is a deeply held secret unless you Google for "aws contract negotiation."
An @awscloud account manager for one of our customers rotated out onto a different account because it had been 20 minutes or whatever, and we randomly encountered them on a new customer six months later.
"Hey, it's great to be working with you folks again!" they gushed. "Oh hey, while I've got your attention, quick question. Do you know anyone who negotiates @awscloud contracts? I have a customer asking."
Read 10 tweets
Corey Quinn Profile picture
4 Feb
The entire reason we didn’t take VC money for the Duckbill group is that we would be pushed to capture as much revenue as possible, as quickly as possible. And the customers lose in that scenario.
Seeking growth and scale at all costs creates situations for bad outcomes for customers, like one-size-fits-all algorithms and automation that doesn’t take into account the customer’s specific goals, architecture, constraints—and their own customers.
“You’re spending $150 million a year on @awscloud? Cool, we’ll knock hilarious amounts off of that for a flat fee that’s less than one engineer’s annual salary.”

VCs would demand a percentage pricing model, and then the whole thing goes to custard.
Read 14 tweets
Corey Quinn Profile picture
3 Feb
I've been critical of the @FinOpsFdn for a while but apparently not so critical that they were too ashamed to release "The 2021 State of FinOps Report."

You may follow along with this thread via data.finops.org if it's still online by the time I get done.
First we--wait. *math math math* Did... did they just add together all of their respondents' numbers and not de-duplicate "folks who work at the same company?"

Aren't these people supposed to be good at a thing that requires exactly this? Image
I mean... get six respondents from a giant AWS customer like Netflix, CapitalOne, etc. and suddenly you can change the entire shape of the survey!
Read 45 tweets
Corey Quinn Profile picture
3 Feb
What should we do tonight, Twitter?
Here we go.

1. New naming rule; words don't repeat in a name. Systems Manager Session Manager? IoT Things Graph? I'm looking at you.

2. Strongly consider the effectiveness of the current messaging to AWS partners of "yes we'll compete with you but don't worry because we're really really bad at anything above a certain point in the stack."
Read 11 tweets
Corey Quinn Profile picture
2 Feb
And now the Amazon Q4 results. Hmm, net sales are up, operating income is flat, and "we're not a PowerPoint company" is increasingly sounding like an excuse.
Talking about a lot of Amazon stuff. I really wish they had a cloud-specific earnings call so I could ignore the rest.
Boasting about reInvent and how rapidly @awscloud innovates. 180 releases over the three week span because someone over there HATES me.
Read 17 tweets

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