DevOps Theory vs Practice: A Song of Ice and TireFire

AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr obviously needs no introduction to anyone even tangentially aware of what AWS is–but did you know that he’s also a philosopher? I recently got to chatting with him about The Future®, and he said something that caught me completely off guard: I sometimes think about the fact that Amazon S3 […]

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.