I'm at the AWS Summit in NYC, where I believe that nicknames are for friends--and Gennifer Artificial Intelligence is no friend of mine.

Good morning. Thirsty much?

Oh god I have to take a technical cert too.

Okay. Let's do Networking Specialty. Practice question 1:

Correct answer is B. "Wrong!" says the answer key, "it's B because network load balancers don't support client IP preservation."

I'm sorry Slack, you're doing fucking WHAT with user DMs, messages, files, etc? I'm positive I'm not reading this correctly. It really says something that you're pushing all work to be done in @SlackHQ, but the opt out is to manually write an email instead of a setting for the workspace, a `/feedback` workflow, etc.

Today's cloud marketing story is called "The Tale of Hot Rebecca," and is a truthful recounting of dinner last night.

Strap in; it's a fun ride. Back in my early 20s, I had a number of friends / acquaintances in my (primarily Jewish) social circle named "Rebecca." It was kind of a problem.

("Can't we spray for them?"
"…not since the 1940s.")

Made it to the #GoogleCloudNext keynote seating finally. Let's see how this goes now that the world is starting to wake up to a "much of the AI hype is unwarranted" reality. Boeing: "HOW ARE THEY DOING IT?!"
Airbus: "We bought a torque wrench?"
Boeing: "No, how are you being a featured customer testimonial at #GoogleCloudNext?"
Airbus: "Oh, that? We made a strategic decision to not be walking poster children for corporate negligence."

And now, some DevOps / SRE / Sysadmin / Ops / ENOUGH already tips I learned from early in my career--brought to us by our friends at Chex™ Mix. All of these are great ideas that you should implement immediately... DNS is notoriously unreliable, so use configuration management to sync all of the servers' /etc/hosts files. Boom, no more single point of failure.

And the Amazon earnings are out for Q4. A miss on @awscloud revenue by $20 million because analysts didn't expect one of you to turn off a single Managed NAT Gateway.

Let's explore deeper into their press release. For 2023, AWS sold $90.8 billion of services, most of which were oversized EC2 instances because you all refuse to believe Compute Optimizer when it tells you there are savings to be had if you're just a smidgen more reasonable.

It's once again the most wonderful time of the year: the newly-renamed @Gartner_inc Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services!

This year there are no visionaries or challengers, just "cloud" vs. "you pretend to be a cloud." Let's explore together! We're going to ignore the "niche players" because for three of them I don't speak Mandarin, and for @IBMcloud I don't speak ancient Greek.

That leaves @awscloud, @Azure, @googlecloud, and @OracleCloud.

Amazon Q / "an AWS spokesmodel" is easily proving incredibly, incredibly helpful at answering the @awscloud questions its human predecessors in corporate comms refused to address. According to an AWS spokesmodel, EC2, S3, and DynamoDB have all seen price increases. I did not know that!

Today's thread is about something I'm rather experienced with...

How to Get Fired With Both Grace and Aplomb Layoffs are circulating, as are PIPs, terminations, and one of those dressed up as another.

The big tell is when you're invited to a last minute meeting with no notice, someone from HR is there, and you aren't offered coffee.

No coffee == No Job in about ten minutes

Adventures in @awscloud bill consulting:

Had a client recently at The @DuckbillGroup whose largest service line item was CloudWatch Logs.

Well okay. It’s been a bit since I’d seen that, let’s talk with them about it. Unsurprisingly the client wasn’t staffed with fools, and logs were super important to their business model.

(Assuming your clients are fools is the consulting kiss of death, and you should find another profession.)

Okay, gather round for a thread. It's been a while since this particular incident arose here at The @DuckbillGroup, and it was amusing / relatable enough that you all might enjoy it.

After all, the best cautionary tales come with a good story. If you're unfamiliar, we fix @awscloud bills. A company reached out to us for bill help as they tend to do, but this one had a very, VERY generic name.

Think "AWS Marketing is too spicy" levels of bland.

Oh hey, the 2023 APM @Gartner_inc Magic Quadrant report is out. Let's go on a guided tour through it.

(If you believe this is going to be boring, then you likely haven't been following me for very long. This is usually described as "an entertaining bloodbath.") The first rankings are how many mandatory fields I need to fill out to download a copy from each vendor's site.
Just like golf, lowest scores win.
AWS: 13
Dynatrace, Elastic: 7
Datadog: 6
SumoRelic: 5
Honeycomb, Splunk: 3
Microsoft: "It's been a few months, give us a minute!"

And it's time once again to parse @ajassy's annual letter to Amazon shareholders, because he cannot escape me as easily as simply fleeing upstairs.

I start with taking exception to his not capitalizing "Shareholders." If I address you as "Dickbag" I'm still gonna capitalize it. "Adjustments in our investment decisions" is a fun way to put it.

The count of "deprecated @awscloud services" now stands at 8.

Hello from Mountain View, where I'm at the @awscloud Community Security Day. The keynote is being given by AWS VP & Distinguished Engineer @paulvixie, who once built a database I'm rather partial to.

(I'm giving a different, worse talk at 11am.) Paul is one of those people where it's a terrific idea to take a default position of "when they're speaking, shut up and listen because you're about to learn one hell of a lot."

His current role is to worry about the security of the @awscloud infrastructure so we don't have to.

If SVB depositors aren’t made whole by basically Monday, I fail to see how there isn’t a run on every non-strategically important bank in the US banking system. Company accounts invariably have more than $250k in them; it’s where payroll comes from, as the first priority.

All SVB’s customers did was “put their operating capital in a bank.” If banks that aren’t basically JPMC come to be viewed as uncertainties we’ve got problems.

Over the holiday I received a truly astounding gift from @mike_julian, @bequinning, @kkuchta, and @hey_imhelen...

It arrived in a wooden crate labeled "Oblong Ham"; inside was a leather-bound book titled... "Did... did they just print out every Tweet I made since 2016?"

Yes, dear reader, they did.

One of the most encouraging things I've seen from @awscloud all year has been the launch of CodeCatalyst.

"Wait, isn't this just another way to run containers?"

Give me a damned second and I'll get there if you stop interrupting me... Unlike previous attempts (Proton, Copilot, HOW DID YOU EVEN GET A GIGABYTE INTO A CLOUDFORMATION TEMPLATE), this is the first app delivery release I've seen from AWS that puts the developer experience first. It's not hard to see why: @editingemily

What is best in life?

"Scams, Harold. The scams."

It's time for the #reInvent keynote about that most magical of scams: selling digital pickaxes into a data gold rush: Machine Learning® Remember, Lambda has 100x more customers than its ML services, based upon statements made in two different keynotes earlier this week. That'd indicate that a lot of the talk around these services is likely hype-driven.

And we're ready for @aselipsky's Wild Ride, better known as his #reinvent keynote...

He takes the stage like a corporate rockstar. SIR IT IS WAY TOO EARLY NASDAQ is moving trading systems to @awscloud. "When the cloud is down, so are the markets" is now ambiguous.

Made it to the #reinvent "Monday Night Live with Peter DeSantis."

The band is playing a rousing ode to the @awscloud bill, "You Spin Me (Right Round Baby)." There's a lot of neat high-level stuff that @awscloud does (and yes, some ridiculous things to), but it all distills down to this: the infrastructure. And I'd say that if AWS misses being "the best in the world at it" it's by a hair's breadth at absolute most.