The Unfulfilled Promise of Serverless

Folks have been making noises for a while that Amazon is anti-competitive in a variety of ways. I don’t disagree with the overall sentiment, but there’s one particular aspect of how AWS advantages its own offerings that I don’t see folks talking about–and strikes me as particularly egregious.

Countless volumes have been written about the various benefits of serverless, a task made even easier by it being such a squishy, nebulous term that’s come to mean basically whatever the author wants it to mean. This has been a boon for AWS’s product teams, who’ve gone from creating services that are clearly serverless such as DynamoDB, Route 53, IAM, and others to instead slapping the “serverless” moniker on things that are clearly not very serverless at all, like OpenSearch and Aurora.

A friend who happens to work at AWS recently had reason to send me about 500 GB of data. This friend is a business user. Now, say what you want about AWS’s hiring practices, they certainly don’t hire people who aren’t intelligent. This intelligent person made the very reasonable determination that the best solution they had available to send me that half terabyte of data was to mail me a hard drive.

If you work for a company with a platform or tool that fosters a community around it, you are not a part of that community.

Amazon S3 encrypting new objects by default is a nice feature, but it’s not the panacea for data breaches that commentators make it out to be.

Today I want to talk about the worst whiteboard confessions of all time, and those invariably all tend to circle around what we ask candidates to do on a whiteboard during job interviews.

You know what really grinds my gears? Well, lots of things, but in this case, let’s talk about multi-cloud. Not my typical rant about multi-cloud not ever being a good best practice—because it’s not—but rather how companies talk about multi-cloud. HashiCorp just did a whole survey on how multi-cloud is the future, and at no point during that entire process did they define the term.

AWS services will only continue to expand, fueled by Amazon’s structure and culture. Its customers lose until AWS figures out how to unite its internal teams.

Getting started with Kubernetes? Try learning it the hard way … seriously. Doing a hands-on tutorial can open new levels of understanding about the platform.

AWS Managed NAT Gateway alternatives have been flimsy at best. In alterNAT, we finally have a viable NAT gateway alternative that saves AWS customers money.

If you’re unfortunate enough to be attending re:Invent in person, you can find a lot of guides suggesting things that are not to be missed, survival tips to remember, and how to get “the best experience” from the show. Most of them are molten garbage. Instead, I’m going to give you the tips I give […]

Cloud integrated development environments (IDE) aren’t being adopted by programmers at the same rate as other cloud technology. What gives?