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20 years on AWS and never not my job

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Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#51

Post by Cpoll »

gobdovan wrote: post #45
djoldman wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone doesn't like Amazon using software they write, they can just outright disallow Amazon from using it in the copywrite license. It's perfectly legal to say: "except for Amazon [and whoever], anyone can use this for any purpose, provided..." Amazon won't intentionally use that software. It's not worth the potential legal liability. That doesn't mean Amazon won't write their own version though if they think th…

I am saying this is exactly what's happening, but with more robust language. If you disallow Amazon, maybe there is a third party that offers our services to Amazon. So Amazon-the-string is not the bogeyman; the concern is the resale or hosted-service arrangement they can access. So you see formulations that target infrastructure resale rather than specific entities, such as: "For the avoidance of doubt, the followin…

> If you disallow Amazon, maybe there is a third party that offers our services to Amazon. So Amazon-the-string is not the bogeyman; the concern is the resale or hosted-service arrangement they can access

That's some acrobatics I suspect Amazon won't engage in, because communicating to the customer that your FooBarDB is managed in AWS but hosted by a third party is awkward.

Amazon will happily reimplement your API with their backend, as they've done before.

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#52

Post by growrow »

gobdovan wrote: post #49
queenkjuul wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm "lucky" to not be smart enough or important enough to think about this. Regardless, i wholeheartedly agree -- at this point, anything i personally could release publicly, will either be fully open source, or completely private. And I'm only choosing open source if I'm relatively sure it's not gonna make some asshole tons of money.

That's in the ballpark how big corps use open source strategically. They try to kill everyone value extraction moat at any other layer than the ones they dominate. So they commoditize their complement [0]. They don't care if you make money based on their OSS, as long as you race to the bottom against anyone else who also has access to it and turn anything but the corp's profit center into a ubiquitous commodity. So t…

That link was a great read and makes a strong point! Another reason corps invest in OSS is to develop something they rely on - special driver, etc - and capitalizing on that in the form of OSS maintainers charging consulting fees has been successful. Exactly in agreement with making the incentives line up with their own.

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#53

Post by cmiles8 »

AWS was the clear undisputed leader for years, but feels like it’s lost its way now.

It knew how to be the market leader and first to market with big launches. It’s now struggling to navigate a world where in more and more areas it’s falling behind. The big early misses on GenAI seem to have accelerated that.

A ton of momentum from earlier years keeps it moving, but that playbook only lasts so long.

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#54

Post by djoldman »

gobdovan wrote: post #45
djoldman wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone doesn't like Amazon using software they write, they can just outright disallow Amazon from using it in the copywrite license. It's perfectly legal to say: "except for Amazon [and whoever], anyone can use this for any purpose, provided..." Amazon won't intentionally use that software. It's not worth the potential legal liability. That doesn't mean Amazon won't write their own version though if they think th…

I am saying this is exactly what's happening, but with more robust language. If you disallow Amazon, maybe there is a third party that offers our services to Amazon. So Amazon-the-string is not the bogeyman; the concern is the resale or hosted-service arrangement they can access. So you see formulations that target infrastructure resale rather than specific entities, such as: "For the avoidance of doubt, the followin…

> I find myself holding back private research because I don't want to provide free R&D for a value-extraction machine that is already efficient enough.

If someone wants to release technology in a way that makes it publicly viewable but restricts its use, they can do that.

If they don't want to release it, they don't have to.

Additionally, publicly released technology destroys patentability, if that's the objective.

I don't understand what one would want to achieve that can't be achieved here.

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#55

Post by daniel-levin »

cperciva wrote: post #50
bob1029 wrote: post #13

I strongly disagree with the part about IAM roles for EC2 > a useful improvement (especially given the urgency after the Capital One breach) but in my view just a mitigation of one particular exploit path rather than addressing the fundamental problem that credentials were being exposed via an interface which was entirely unsuitable for that purpose. What alternative interface does the author propose we use to secure…

What alternative interface does the author propose we use to securely exchange credentials? If you read the linked post you'll see that at the time I suggested using XenStore to pass credentials to the OS kernel. Obviously a different approach would be needed with Nitro but if anything it would be easier now. Once the kernel had them they could be exposed to applications via a synthetic filesystem which, crucially, c…

Before the AI craze, there were plans to allow guests to cleave off an AWS-managed enclave and expose IMDS to only that enclave [0]. No creds would ever be visible to the guest. The enclave would function as a signing oracle. The exact interface was being bikeshod before the project was shelved in the name of geNAi lEaDeRsHiP.

[0] 86a7b126fea03dd57e6a3c9c9b7951b5318d33029cef0547ff441862174682f5 is the sha256 of the shelved project’s name

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#56

Post by cperciva »

daniel-levin wrote: post #55
cperciva wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What alternative interface does the author propose we use to securely exchange credentials? If you read the linked post you'll see that at the time I suggested using XenStore to pass credentials to the OS kernel. Obviously a different approach would be needed with Nitro but if anything it would be easier now. Once the kernel had them they could be exposed to applications via a synthetic filesystem which, crucially, c…

Before the AI craze, there were plans to allow guests to cleave off an AWS-managed enclave and expose IMDS to only that enclave [0]. No creds would ever be visible to the guest. The enclave would function as a signing oracle. The exact interface was being bikeshod before the project was shelved in the name of geNAi lEaDeRsHiP. [0] 86a7b126fea03dd57e6a3c9c9b7951b5318d33029cef0547ff441862174682f5 is the sha256 of the s…

Right, I've got 19 years of NDAs so I try to be careful about what I talk about publicly...

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#57

Post by MyUltiDev »

A 20 year retrospective with no Hetzner or OVH numbers in sight is a bit of a tell. I run workloads across AWS, Hetzner, and a couple of smaller providers, and the gap is not subtle. For a small to medium web stack you are looking at roughly $350 a month on AWS versus 20 to 25 euros on Hetzner for similar specs, plus 20 TB of bandwidth included instead of being billed at 9 cents a gig after the first 100. What AWS actually sells at this point is not compute, it is the IAM model, the global footprint, the deep integrations, and the org chart consensus that nobody gets fired for picking it. That is a real product and worth a lot in some shops, but it is a very different product from what cloud meant in 2006. For the people who have actually moved a real workload off AWS recently, what was the part that turned out to be more painful than you expected?

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#59

Post by [deleted] »

djoldman wrote: post #41
gobdovan wrote: post #9

The author calls it a 'joke' that Heroes are just unpaid Amazon employees, but reality doesn't become a joke just because it's funny. The asymmetry here is staggering. I find myself holding back private research because I don't want to provide free R&D for a value-extraction machine that is already efficient enough. The author was at least dependency-driven in their contribution, but outside that kind of dependency,…

If someone doesn't like Amazon using software they write, they can just outright disallow Amazon from using it in the copywrite license. It's perfectly legal to say: "except for Amazon [and whoever], anyone can use this for any purpose, provided..." Amazon won't intentionally use that software. It's not worth the potential legal liability. That doesn't mean Amazon won't write their own version though if they think th…

[deleted]

Re: 20 years on AWS and never not my job

#60

Post by cperciva »

CoryOndrejka wrote: post #39

> in fact in one of Jeff Barr's AWS user meetups in Second Life There's so much about that phrase that makes me smile. Easy to forget that Second Life was also one of the earliest users of AWS, S3 first. Jeff Bezos had personally invested in our 2005 round (a round that made Linden Lab a unicorn before that was a thing) and pointed us at Jeff Barr and the work coming from AWS. In return, Jeff Barr started hosting AWS…

Indeed, when re:Invent 2020 went virtual and we had a virtual space we could walk around I had a major sense of deja vu -- of course Second Life on a laptop was very different from wearing VR goggles.
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