Corey Quinn

In the run-up to re:Invent (where as you might imagine I had a whole mess of other things on my mind) AWS significantly expanded their free tier offering for outbound data transfer. TechRadar called it “a major expansion,” The Register likewise sang its praises, and CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince claimed he was “doing a dance […]

AWS published its analysis of last week’s us-east-1 outage, and it raises more questions than it answers. I understand that they wanted to get it out when they did (late on a Friday during one of the worst cybersecurity flaps in years), to avoid excessive attention. But I’m unconvinced in reading it that the outage […]

The latest Amazon Linux adds SELinux security by default, an improvement that will convince many people to abandon it.

Counting AWS “customers” can mean wildly different things; best to give up on tracking sign-ons and user accounts and look for better ways to measure growth.

I’ve given so much grief to the AWS Managed NAT Gateway over the last few years that if I were to pass all of that grief through one of the gateways themselves it would bankrupt my company. It occurred to me that while I’ve talked about my problems with the service in bits and pieces […]

AWS offers its usual re:Invent justification letter to get your boss to let you attend re:Invent. As per my annual re:Quinnvent tradition, I’ve modified it slightly and sent it to my business partner: Dearest Mike Julian, I’d like your blessing and permission to attend AWS re:Invent 2021, Nov. 29 – Dec. 3 in Las Vegas. […]

I suggest that serverless computing, or “serverless” has hype that at this point has outpaced what the technology / philosophy / religion has been promising. Serverless computing arrived (debatably; please do not email me about this whatever you do, fans of Google App Engine / CGI scripts / managed SaaS offerings / pedants) with something […]

Let’s talk about the dumbest dollars a cloud provider can possibly make. No, I’m not talking about data egress or the Managed NAT Gateway data processing fee; those are rent-seeking behaviors that embody Day 2 thinking. I’m talking about the dumbest money — the kind where cloud providers step over dollars to pick up pennies. […]

Today, I want to talk about TurboTax. Yes, while Intuit is a longstanding AWS reference customer, I’m not here to talk about its cloud bills. Instead, I’m going to apply its consumer tax product to how I think about AWS bill savings. For readers who aren’t in the United States or familiar with the way […]

It’s been three years since I turned down an attractive job offer at AWS because of the required noncompete agreement. Frankly, I still don’t have any regrets about the decision as Amazon piles on. Since this article was originally published in August 2019, a lot has happened: AWS sued Brian Hall in 2020 under the […]

Cloudflare announced its own object storage offering last week, snarkily naming it “R2” instead of AWS’ “S3.” Storage is great, but let’s tie it to cloud economics here. We don’t have specifics as to edge case pricing dimensions, but Cloudflare’s blog post goes into some detail about how it works. First, it charges a rate […]

Everyone says that the next million cloud customers are coming from enterprise IT. It’s the narrative that all of the major cloud platforms have been saying for a while — to the point that I started accepting it uncritically. I even recently wrote about those next million enterprise IT customers. Oof. No! That’s not how […]