A Day in the Life of Server #47B-2: An AWS Data Center Memoir

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 […]

Once upon a time, file storage meant your filing cabinet. In some ways, today’s file storage is very different — and in others, it hasn’t changed at all. File storage is a system for keeping data in an organized hierarchy of files and folders. You can share that hierarchy across a network, so multiple people […]

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 […]

Block storage is a low-level technology that underpins the majority of modern storage — including whatever device you’re reading this on. It divides data into small units called “blocks,” which provide fast and flexible ways to manage data. It’s ideal for local storage and high-performance workloads. This is the first article in a three-part series […]

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 […]

Years ago, I founded a company that built iPhone apps. And those apps needed web services.  Back in 2009, that meant you ordered rack-mounted servers at Dell, carried them into your local data center for colocation, and managed them by hand or through automation tools like Ansible. I vividly remember spending nights restoring crashed servers […]

It started as a meme, but it turned into a real post on “The 17 Ways to Run Containers on AWS.” Apparently my list continues to be a source of amusement inside of AWS. Given that I do prefer to give the people what they want, I’d like to talk about 17 more ways to […]

How AWS makes its billions — $13 billion in operating income in 2020 alone — to support the bulk of Amazon’s net income is a question that stumps the public. To shine some light on the topic, CNBC’s Jordan Novet published an article on AWS’ estimated margins on a per-service basis. Amazon obviously isn’t publishing […]

Periodically I get someone excited to talk to me about their new AWS bill optimization tool. This is the shorthand “cheat sheet” that addresses how I think about these things. It looks like you’re building a SaaS tool to manage AWS cost optimization. I don’t think it will work. Here’s why I don’t think it […]

The cloud wars are getting a lot more interesting this week. A Cloud Guru’s senior director of content and community, AWS Serverless Hero, and friend of this newsletter (“Aaaah! DON’T CALL ME THAT! DON’T EVER CALL ME THAT!”) Forrest Brazeal has announced that he’s accepted a role as Google Cloud’s head of content. This has […]

If you’ve taken the Cloud Resume Challenge, it’s reasonable to assume that you’re looking to start a career in the world of cloud computing. Congratulations or condolences, to your preference. There’s a good chance that in hopes of snaring your next great job, you’ve built a portfolio website on top of AWS to show off […]

Not all cloud customers are the same, but there seems to be a lack of awareness of this in the industry. Let me sketch out two customer personas for you. Customer A is a SaaS company. They run their environment on the cloud in some way: Perhaps it’s all-in-on one provider, perhaps it’s multi-cloud (which […]