AWS Is Asleep at the Lambda Wheel

I had a horrific support experience due to a product (it was a predecessor to Colab that they eventually just cancelled) that was (due to a bug that they eventually fixed) triggering the startup of expensive instances randomly that cost hundreds of dollars a week to run. I couldn't get any help, until I eventually out of desperation found a BigQuery evangelist on a Reddit forum who escalated my issue.

Venting rant below:

It's blatantly obvious that Google's culture is completely broken, and they are incapable of hiring people who don't think they're too brilliant and amazing to be customer support. They care about their advertising printing press and everything else is secondary.

Tensorflow was the first out of the gate, quickly got its ass handed to it by PyTorch, and then they just imitated Pytorch, but in a crappy, crowded API kind of way. Angular is hilarious in a sad, pathetic, "wow that guy still thinks he's doing something useful, doesn't he realize nobody cares" kind of way. Dart..... well, I don't even need to say anything more. I bet there are people on HN who deeply regret investing time in learning it. Colab: "We have paid plans! If you pay, it will be only semi-useless!" (I tried the paid version, utterly useless compared to Paperspace)

If anyone from Google is reading this, sorry, but you work at a company that is rotting like early 2000s Microsoft. Even my highly non-technical wife was asking me the other day if I had noticed how shitty the search engine is now.

BTW, am I the only one who bought a Google Home speaker and used to listen to Youtube podcasts on it, only to have a software update make it so that now I can't even use Chromecast to send any Youtube video's audio to my speaker? Really awesome Google. First time in my life I've purchased a product and had it literally lose features a year after I bought it. Also, Google Meet sucks, and has become increasingly bug ridden over the years.

I feel like AWS is one of those things where you gotta stick to the good parts. A lot of stuff is half baked but there’s a decent slice of it that works quite well

> that's no diss on Jeff, I think he does an awesome job

Honest question: How is Lambda runtime version rot acceptable to an "awesome" top exec like Jeff Barr? Is someone else demanding he siphon resources away from maintaining key services? What data-driven metric says maintaining service quality shouldn't be continually prioritized?

I'm open to any explanation, but the logical conclusion I see if the lack of prioritization only really makes sense if internally, Lambda is considered a gimmicky toy. Where is the "Customer Obsession" mantra here?

A large portion of the most valuable work in software is of the boring, unsexy variety needed to keep key pillars working smoothly.

Disclaimer: I work at AWS in Professional Services.

I can honestly say that I have never been pressured to create a more expensive solution for a customer. Everyone from sales, to account managers, to TAMs are are always trying to figure out how to help customer spend less money on their existing workloads.

Before anyone says I’m drinking the kool aid, I’m 49 years old and this is my 8th job since 1996. I’m the most cynical person you can imagine.

Now there is a difference between wanting customers to spend less on existing workloads and helping them optimize and trying to convince customers to spend more money by bringing in new work.

I've been an AWS customer since the thing before S3 I think was called SQS.

And whether I've been small, or massive, ProServ and TAMs always always did what you're saying.

When we were big enough, you'd even (no joke) get in an actual automobile and drive to us, to yell at us about wasting money.

It was great you did that.