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Amazon Will Spend Nearly a Year of AWS Revenue on AI Investments

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Re: Amazon Will Spend Nearly a Year of AWS Revenue on AI Investments

#71

Post by teitoklien »

scarface_74 wrote: post #20
teitoklien wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

… Everywhere ? OVH, Hetzner, Cloudflare, Vultr, Linode, Scaleway, Equinix (ok Equinix this can be pricey at lower levels) A million other regional VPS providers, Colocation Hosts, etc ?

You really think that all people do with AWS is host a bunch of VMs and they manage all of the services (databases, storage, big data services, messaging apps) themselves? Drill down in each category https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-overview/...

I’ve used most of those services and know well that outside of DynamoDB, EC2/Lightsail, S3, DataLakes (s3+athena) and AWS Lambda.

Most of aws services have sub-par performance for insane prices, for components that can easily be replaced at scale with open source more mature components.

Programmers have just lost all of their sysadmin skills these days and will use everything to justify the need for these insane , low performance abstraction abomination that Netifly, AWS RDS, AWS RedisCache, AWS TimeseriesDB, etc are.

Whatsapp used to process billions of users and exited for a billion dollar+ valuation and exit, with just a few FreeBSD running VPSes running their code, and a 20 person employee team…

Most people will never touch stuff in scale of whatsapp, stack overflow, instagram.

and they did it all just fine. Programmers should be mandated to learn Linux and Sysadmin skills again instead of re-inventing entire bullshit services for what is essentially often systemd replacement or a crontab/fcron replacement.

Re: Amazon Will Spend Nearly a Year of AWS Revenue on AI Investments

#72

Post by belter »

lesuorac wrote: post #60
belter wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a redflag here. Their CapEx is growing faster than revenue. And there is no apparent direct correlation between AWS growth, percentage wise, and CapEx surge...Using CapEx makes profits look higher today...

Did we read a different article? It seems like the claim is that it pays for itself in under 2 years. > For AI servers and the datacenters that wrap around them, as we have shown here, for every $1 you spend for an AI cluster and its datacenter (including its power and cooling), you get 87.8 cents back every year that you rent that AI cluster out to customers, assuming a reasonable mix of on-demand and reserved insta…

I am discussing this in the context of their disclosures for Q4 and historical reporting. The "pays itself in 2 years" is intuitively wrong and on the basis of 100% usage estimates.

CapEx exploded while depreciation barely increased means Amazon pushed more spending into assets that won’t be depreciated immediately. This inflates short-term profits. In 2024, CapEx surged to almost 120% of operating income. They are spending more on investments than they earn from operations. I dont think it's sustainable.

Re: Amazon Will Spend Nearly a Year of AWS Revenue on AI Investments

#73

Post by DanielHB »

rbanffy wrote: post #33
DanielHB wrote: post #32

Really looking forward what all that GPU compute is going to do for non AI stuff once it quiets down a little.

With that much power, we’ll be able to reliably predict a hundred thousand years into the future of our societies and shorten the period of barbarism after the fall of the galactic empire.

I was wondering all the crappy simulation software used in engineering that is still CPU-bound.

Re: Amazon Will Spend Nearly a Year of AWS Revenue on AI Investments

#74

Post by OptionOfT »

scarface_74 wrote: post #31
late2part wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you one of the many overemployed people that also worked at AWS?

I am 50. I have always had a strict policy of never doing two jobs or a “side hustle”. Whatever we can’t do from my working one job, we don’t do. That means no open source work worrying about my GitHub profile, no BS “thought leadership” posts on LinkedIn. Nothing. When I get off of work, I shut my computer down and live my life - exercising, travel, spending time with friends and family, etc.

That's a wonderful attitude. I'm the same. The stuff that's on my GitHub is there for me, I needed it and/or I wanted to contribute to it. It's not for visibility.

But with that I do feel that I've had a couple of jobs slip through the cracks. Not enough exposure.

Re: Amazon Will Spend Nearly a Year of AWS Revenue on AI Investments

#75

Post by scarface_74 »

OptionOfT wrote: post #74
scarface_74 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am 50. I have always had a strict policy of never doing two jobs or a “side hustle”. Whatever we can’t do from my working one job, we don’t do. That means no open source work worrying about my GitHub profile, no BS “thought leadership” posts on LinkedIn. Nothing. When I get off of work, I shut my computer down and live my life - exercising, travel, spending time with friends and family, etc.

That's a wonderful attitude. I'm the same. The stuff that's on my GitHub is there for me, I needed it and/or I wanted to contribute to it. It's not for visibility. But with that I do feel that I've had a couple of jobs slip through the cracks. Not enough exposure.

The truth about not doing open source work and a personal GitHub profile is kind of lie.

The department I worked for at AWS had a very easy to use open source approval process to open source work we did from scratch for a client as long as it didn’t have client information we could put it here after approval.

https://github.com/aws-samples

I was able to legally/ethically fork all of the work I submitted (MIT Licensed) to my own profile after I left. But, no one cared or even looked at my open source profile.

However, I was also a major contributor to a popular open source “AWS Solution” that was big in its niche.

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/

That did lead to two interviews and one job offer in 2023 year.

Almost all of my projects and the “solution” are obsolete now. I was able to use most of them last year with some tweaking.

Re: Amazon Will Spend Nearly a Year of AWS Revenue on AI Investments

#76

Post by scarface_74 »

rbanffy wrote: post #70
scarface_74 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You “worked with a couple of workloads” and that’s what makes you an expert on infrastructure and architecture at scale? Your LinkedIn profile is your HN profile. I see you have worked at some large well known companies. How can you possibly not have been exposed to some large deployments? These are three companies that you have worked at https://www.workday.com/en-us/company/partners/amazon-web-se... https://aws.ama…

And none of those is “the simple case” I alluded to. The vast majority of businesses need, perhaps, email, file sharing, instant messaging and, perhaps, a website. They won’t train their own ML models, nor have parallel sysplexes of mainframes spread across multiple datacenters.

So, in the grand scheme of things, how much revenue do you think all of those small businesses combined make compared to just the combined business revenue and compute needs of just the large companies you have worked for?

It surprises me that you have blinders on to an industry where you personally have worked for companies with large enough implementations that AWS has felt the need to brag about

Re: Amazon Will Spend Nearly a Year of AWS Revenue on AI Investments

#77

Post by scarface_74 »

teitoklien wrote: post #71
scarface_74 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really think that all people do with AWS is host a bunch of VMs and they manage all of the services (databases, storage, big data services, messaging apps) themselves? Drill down in each category https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-overview/...

I’ve used most of those services and know well that outside of DynamoDB, EC2/Lightsail, S3, DataLakes (s3+athena) and AWS Lambda. Most of aws services have sub-par performance for insane prices, for components that can easily be replaced at scale with open source more mature components. Programmers have just lost all of their sysadmin skills these days and will use everything to justify the need for these insane , lo…

Maybe all of these companies know something you don’t know?

For every WhatsApp that you cite used their own infrastructure, I can site companies like Netflix and Apple that decided to use the public cloud and AWS in particular

> Programmers have just lost all of their sysadmin skills these days and will use everything to justify the need for these insane , low performance abstraction abomination that Netifly, AWS RDS, AWS RedisCache, AWS TimeseriesDB, etc are.

Does it add business value as programmers to spend time babysitting infrastructure? Does it “make the beer taste better”? Does it help to move faster? I can set up an entire highly available data center with all of these services you mentioned with a few lines of yaml/HCL.

Re: Amazon Will Spend Nearly a Year of AWS Revenue on AI Investments

#78

Post by rbanffy »

scarface_74 wrote: post #76
rbanffy wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And none of those is “the simple case” I alluded to. The vast majority of businesses need, perhaps, email, file sharing, instant messaging and, perhaps, a website. They won’t train their own ML models, nor have parallel sysplexes of mainframes spread across multiple datacenters.

So, in the grand scheme of things, how much revenue do you think all of those small businesses combined make compared to just the combined business revenue and compute needs of just the large companies you have worked for? It surprises me that you have blinders on to an industry where you personally have worked for companies with large enough implementations that AWS has felt the need to brag about

In what does that change my initial observation that the vast majority of companies don’t need more than the most basic cloud services?

Re: Amazon Will Spend Nearly a Year of AWS Revenue on AI Investments

#79

Post by scarface_74 »

rbanffy wrote: post #78
scarface_74 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, in the grand scheme of things, how much revenue do you think all of those small businesses combined make compared to just the combined business revenue and compute needs of just the large companies you have worked for? It surprises me that you have blinders on to an industry where you personally have worked for companies with large enough implementations that AWS has felt the need to brag about

In what does that change my initial observation that the vast majority of companies don’t need more than the most basic cloud services?

Who are these vast majority of companies? The second company I worked for between 2000-2008 that I spoke about here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42985966

With 20-30 people on staff if I were responsible for that architecture today. I would need:

A MySQL instance with read replicas (we had that back then onsite)

SQL Server for a some legacy projects - we had those too.

File Transfer family for FTP transfers and some automations around that.

Web servers and load balancers.

SQS and probably Lambda. Back then we used MSMQ and later MQSeries and a home grown application servers that took care of asynchronous message processing.

Web servers - a couple of EC2 instances and a load balancer and these days because of how the internet is probably WAF.

We would have needed something to orchestrate our ETL jobs. Back then we ran on 15 physical computers we would probably use something like AWS Batch today.

And of course S3.

You see how quickly your needs escalate once you are doing any real workloads?

The next smallest company I worked for had 50-60 people this was between 2018-2020. We sold access to aggregated publicly available health care provider data as well as some other health care related data. Our micro services were used by large health care companies as the backend to their websites and mobile devices and one new customer could increase the load on services they subscribed to by 20%.

Here we also needed multiple MySqL databases, CloudFront, WAF, Cognito, ElasticSearch, Redshift for large analytical loads, EC2 for some legacy software, S3, ECS for the microservices, Lambda/SQS and step functions for some ETL jobs that scaled from 0 to hundreds of thousands of transactions, Cognito for authentication, etc

You might not remember. But around March 2020, health care providers websites were being hit hard because of a little virus that was going around, the scalability that we put in place came in handy then.

Do you propose that we should have hosted all of that on some VMs?

Re: Amazon Will Spend Nearly a Year of AWS Revenue on AI Investments

#80

Post by throwaway290 »

bdangubic wrote: post #50
ziddoap wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perfect example of a fantasy put forth by an executive.

these kind of comments on HN show me how many people lack creativity. wherever you work(ed) I am sure you met myriad of people and thought: - they don’t do shit - I can do what they do in my sleep it is these types of jobs that are being replaced and are easily replaceable with a little bit of creativity and imagination…

If management knows that underperformers are underperformers in order to fire them in favor of LLMs then management could do it already in favor of better workers.

You can basically string replace "replace underperforming humans" with "replace humans". That is their dream

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