The AWS Morning show you never knew you wanted

Join me as I continue the Whiteboard Confessional series with a look at org charts and why they are the most disturbing thing to see on any whiteboard at any company. I touch upon Conway’s Law, the pros and cons of companies like Amazon having a ton of different teams, my hypothesis for why so many Google services get deprecated, how all data center architecture diagrams are out of date, how restructures are fundamentally about selling someone on their own irrelevance, the real reason companies go through digital transformations, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of July 20, 2020.

Join me as I continue the Whiteboard Confessional series by exploring job interviews for engineers and why they tend to be universally terrible. In this episode, I discuss why open-ended questions are usually obnoxious, how it seems like a question you’re asked in an interview is a problem the company is experiencing at that moment and wants you to solve for free, how awesome it is when companies pay people to take tests, how there are many books written on how to pass an interview and few books written on how to give a good one, how you can tell a lot about a company by the way they hire people, how engineers should be interviewed, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of July 13, 2020.

Join me as I continue the Whiteboard Confessional series with a look at the time my friend’s personal AWS bill increased 9,000% month-to-month. I discuss the concerns you’re going to have when you build on Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud, and AWS, how this monstrous bill came into being in the first place, why organizations might not even notice this sort of billing discrepancy, what AWS should do to make sure this doesn’t happen to people’s personal accounts in the future, what a better approach to the AWS free tier could look like, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of July 7, 2020.

Join me as I continue the Whiteboard Confessional series by examining IBM Cloud’s recent widespread outage. I talk about why you should never make fun of someone else’s downtime, how IBM’s response to the outage was abysmal, what cloud providers should do whenever their systems go down, how a cloud provider’s status page can never be dependent on things they are personally running, why IBM Cloud deserves the Oxymoron of the Year award, why it’s important to let the broader community learn from your major mistakes, how this fiasco demonstrates that IBM Cloud isn’t ready to properly service the market, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of June 29, 2020.

Join me as I continue the Whiteboard Confessional series by talking about how I log into all of the various AWS accounts I use for work, why using IAM passwords and username pairs is patently ridiculous, how AWS Single Sign-On is supposed to be great but just makes me angry, everything there is to know about aws-vault and why I needed a better solution, a complicated workaround I created for password management that was ridiculously overbuilt but works, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of June 22, 2020.

Join me as I continue the Whiteboard Confessional series with a look at multi-factor authentication (MFA) and the time my business partner Mike Julian lost his MFA device and needed to reset his Amazon MFA token and couldn’t figure out how. Among other things, I discuss why you shouldn’t make decisions or record podcasts when you’re angry, why you shouldn’t store MFA codes in your password manager, why your policies and procedures won’t matter if someone chooses to disregard them, how you should expect people to do the wrong thing and make it easy to do the right thing, why you shouldn’t incentivize people to hide mistakes, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of June 15, 2020