Will the powerpoint slides feature a new template?
Will analysts remember that Amazon has a Cloud division?
Stay tuned for another episode of "As The Cloud Yearns"
(Periodic reminder that the single stock I own outside of an index fund is six shares of $AMZN that I've held for years. Not for any hope of financial gain, but because one glorious day I will shitpost via shareholder resolution.)
AWS earnings beat estimates at $13.5B for 2021 Q1 because nobody listens to me and turns their EC2 instances off when they're done with them.
Disney and @awscloud deepen their partnership; cloud continues to ship a lot of Goofy nonsense.
Amazon continues to struggle with properly titling PDFs. WorkDocs sheds a single tear.
Now @awscloud revenue is 12% of all of Amazon's.
Growth accelerated to 32%.
Employee compensation did the same, right?
I used to have to make nuanced arguments to @awscloud staff that changing companies was the best way to get ahead. Now I need only slap them upside the head and point to @aselipsky.
I'm tickled pink that the @awscloud earnings call is being livestreamed out via @fastly.
Fun fact: Amazon's quarterly profit annualizes to $25K per each of its 1.3 million employees.
Be sure to mark your calendars; it's the very definition of rudeness if you don't wish every Amazonian you know a Happy Prime Day this June.
While we wait for the call to begin, The Duckbill Group announced that our @awscloud Lambda bill is now over $80 a month.
And we start with the call at long last.
Brian Olsavsky (CFO) is on the call to field questions.
Starting with last mile delivery questions.
I listen with half an ear in case they mention the @awscloud Snowmobile.
"We're not a Powerpoint company" says Amazon, not that they had to.
Wait, that's not right. Hey @amazon IR, why is the slide portion of your earnings webcast the slides from three months ago?
An @awscloud question about the backlog. Presumably sales, not features.
$52.9 billion backlogged over the next 3 years. Up about 55%. That's people committing to spend in return for discounting, in case you wondered. Think EDPs and PPAs joining hands.
If you had "It's still Day One" on your $AMZN bingo card, DRINK!
An analyst gets themselves dis-invited from future calls by asking about Prime Day without wishing the Amazonians a happy one.
A question from Bank of America about @awscloud and also with a barking dog in the background.
If we hear the dog, we get to see the dog, @BankofAmerica! Have you no respect for the rules?!
"Is the @awscloud acceleration in any particular vertical or company profile?"
AWS:
Direct quote. I kinda thought that to work at Amazon you had to understand how dogs work?
1. "What are you most excited about to improve the consumer offering?" 2. "What have you learned about the Echo journey?"
On the first, boosting 1-day shipping back to normal levels post-pandemic in Europe. In the US, non-specific last mile incremental delivery improvement. In Prime Video, they want more awards plz. Also LotR coming soon.
On the Echo portion: More hardware choices, making Alexa smarter, embedding it into more devices throughout the home.
So I want to talk a bit tonight about college degrees.
Let me begin with the obvious: I don't have one. Today that's a fun story; my 20s were harder as a result.
It's clear that a degree makes you more employable than no degree.
But I've spoken with a few people lately who aren't happy with their current jobs and are toying with going back to school for a(nother) degree.
Slow down a second, Hasty Pudding; let me unpack that one for a minute.
A degree is expensive; I'm not going to do the math for you on that one. But it's also a lot of time that you're spending not making money, in most cases.
I've spoken to several people with two degrees who are convinced that a third will make them more employable.
So I make fun of @IBM a lot, but an awful lot of that is based on my perception of them as an *institution*.
They're eternal, for all practical purposes; it feels like making fun of a mountain. What's the mountain care?
But they've done a lot of neat stuff.
I talk about being a terrible employee, but probably the best job I ever had was @TaosTech.
IBM acquired them recently, and the folks I know are happy as clams.
One of our great consulting clients was @InstanaHQ; those folks are *SHARP*.
IBM acquired them. I have heard no wailing or gnashing of teeth.
If we go back in time three years, @SpotifyEng committed to spending $150 million a year on @GoogleCloud (assuming flatline / no growth. HAH!).
This report doesn't really highlight the stupendous scale of Spotify's cloud environment, so without further context I worry that it's going to be something that Twitter for Pets tries to adopt in its three person engineering team.
So once upon a time I worked in a shop where the ops folks were divided into two teams.
AppOps, which handled the care and feeding of the application the company ran, and SysOps, which handled maintaining the Linux servers.
I was on the SysOps team. We handled filesystems, monitoring via Nagios, datacenter buildouts (this was pre-cloud), filesystem work, etc.
We were sysadmins. Today those jobs are called DevOps or SRE. Same job, better pay.
The AppOps teams started with the care and feeding of Jboss or Tomcat or whatever the hell middleware we used in that era, and went into the app from there.
They communicated constantly with the app developers and knew heaps about Java heaps.