The One-Way Door of AWS Transform: a Secret 24-month Lock-Up

Here’s a thing I’ve always wanted to do: take Andy Jassy’s annual shareholder letter and translate it into human.

Changing AWS Chatbot to Amazon Q Developer presumably serves internal AWS purposes that may or may not resemble empire-building, but it serves no customers.

Here’s how AWS is doing at each of the three layers the business has identified for its approach to AI.

Disaster recovery / business continuity / “backups” are always an interesting subject for very large scale cloud environments. Many of the old data-center strategies that grumpy old sysadmins (that’s me!) relied upon don’t hold water anymore.

In a move that’s equal parts predictable and surprising, AWS has decided to make their Valkey-based services significantly cheaper than their Redis counterparts.

I was in New York this week for the AWS Summit, and while it’s always great to catch up with readers (thanks to those of you who came out to the drinkup!), AWS friends, and others, I found myself rather taken aback by the overwhelming strength behind the Generative AI theme of the entire event. […]

There have been some noises about this week’s newsletter issue in which I criticized the release of AWS Compute Optimizer offering RDS recommendations…Let me clarify my position and commentary on this feature announcement.

This morning’s announcement that Adam Selipsky would be stepping down as AWS CEO, with longtime Amazonian Matt Garman stepping into the role, feels like a natural correction. Garman has long been seen as the heir apparent to AWS’s leadership. When Selipsky was named CEO in the last succession, my initial reaction was a baffled, “I’m sorry, who?”

AWS has been very publicly insecure about the perception that it’s lagging behind in the Generative AI space for the past year. Unfortunately, rather than setting those perceptions to rest, AWS’s GenAI extravaganza at re:Invent 2023 seemed to prove them true.  Of the 22 GenAI-related announcements, half of them are still in preview. Many were […]

Let’s begin with the tl;dr: At this year’s re:Invent, I’m hosting a photo scavenger hunt with significant prizes for “most items found” and “most creative entry.” Sign up through my webapp at findme.lastweekinaws.com. The rest of this post details how I built this app.

AWS may be using your data to train its AI models, and you may have unwittingly consented to it. Prepare to jump through a series of complex hoops to stop it.

AWS re:Invent looms larger on the calendar with each passing day, promising not just an avalanche of new services but also–let’s face it–some truly perplexing names. However, the oddity of AWS service names is low-hanging fruit. The true enigma lies in their labyrinthine pricing dimensions.