The Dangers of Celebrity in Tech

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.