Thread by @QuinnyPig

It’s earnings day for @amazon and by extension @awscloud.

Haven’t gotten into it yet, but after hours trading sees their stock down 20%, and what was at close a $1.130T company has lost its fourth comma.

AWS has grown 27% year over year, but Amazon is getting pounded because of the underpants store underperforming + analysts being bad at forecasting.

It would have posted only a 26% growth rate but they tricked me into a big SageMaker Canvas bill.

Seeing comparisons to Azure's 42% growth rate.

Microsoft does not disclose Azure revenues.

So okay; I concede that AWS's $16.1 billion to $20.5 billion YoY growth is not as high proportionally as Azure's $100 to $142 growth over the same period.

It's analyst call time. Amazon forgot one key part on its opening disclaimer: "we are not a PowerPoint company."

Amazon ad sales are up 25%; they're now making $9.5 billion a quarter via selling customer trust to anyone with money.

"We've been working with @awscloud enterprise customers to lower their bills." Yeah, and how's that working out for them? Ever notice you don't see a case study success story on these general statements?

Amazon has cut their capex budget by a third for next year; this bodes ill for governments attempting to shake them down for an AWS region "investment."

"AWS margins are lower than we would have expected; is that because of stock vesting for employees, or is that the new normal for AWS margins?"

Blames inflation for AWS engineers costing more. @awscloud friends, have you seen significant COLA increases this year?

"When you talk about optimization and efficiency by customers, what are you seeing in actual pullback demand? Also, for backlog it's growing significantly compared to resume, how do you handle that?"

The real answer to the backlog ($104 billion) is that when customers don't hit their contractual commitments, they add some token amount and then extend it out a year or two. That's why it's growing.

They dance around this and cite "increased new customer signups."

As far as the cost improvements go, AWS says they're rearchitecting and using better higher-level services. Sure, Jan.

Most AWS recommendations distill down to "buy some RIs" or "rearchitect everything to serverless." I'm not a fan of those being presented as the best options.

Many AWS employees are checking their $400k in vesting Amazon equity and discovering that after-hours it's suddenly $360K.

This is exactly how it feels when you discover that you left a SageMaker Canvas session running. Take note.

A *lot* more dodging, weaving, and answers that are technically true but give a misleading impression than any Amazon earnings call I've ever heard before.

The analysts for their part have woken up to the reality that they need to care more about cloud and less about underpants.

During the earnings call, @awscloud announced you can now replace the root volume of running EC2 instances in place without taking the thing down.

They're also expected to announce that every #reinvent attendee will be required to run a Managed NAT Gateway the entire time.

Amazon Aurora now supports cluster export to S3, customers reportedly considering cluster export to on-prem instead.

The snark.cloud/shirt Charity T-Shirt Campaign remains active; your support of @826National is appreciated.

Responses to my question about increased @awscloud compensation costs all distill down to "what the hell is a COLA?"