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Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

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Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#81

Post by zjaffee »

sokoloff wrote: post #77
zjaffee wrote: post #35

I'm also an AWS alumni from many years back now, and truthfully, the organizational problems really took off when Jassy moved to being CEO of amazon as a whole and major leaders left the company (Charlie Bell, et al.). There were always other problems too, pressure on the company in both directions across many different product lines on both cost (any number of cheaper baremetal providers who are much faster at provi…

I find it hard to call Amazon robotics a failure. All of the small/binnable item FCs make extensive (and, as an outsider, apparently very productive) use of robotics.

I'm talking specifically their AWS service for ROS applications, all of my concerns are AWS specific for that matter, not the robotics they build in house.

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#82

Post by jtwaleson »

sscaryterry wrote: post #61
archturtle wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just happens that these very-lesser-paid workers are usually Indian, Filipino and Moroccan, I guess. And if a company goes this route, they're most likely significantly cutting costs at the expense of the provided service

It is nothing other than modern slavery.

It is _very_ different. In the case of outsourcing, where companies offer decent local wages in developing countries, it can not be compared to slavery which is the perpetual ownership of a person.

Now with H1B sponsorship, where I've heard rumors of companies taking away passports of their workers, it is very much evil, but not slavery.

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#83

Post by bigfatkitten »

fooker wrote: post #39
mattmanser wrote: post #28

I was enjoying the article and then he makes some of the most bizarre claims about what cloud did and how we had to provision servers If any of you young'uns read this, that is not how we had to do provisioning before cloud. VMs already existed before AWS came out. You could already provision a new server usually in minutes and rent it month to month. In fact, all the existing VM server companies had to start calling…

AWS was launched around 2006 (2002 internally at Amazon I think). Where could you rent VMs in 2006? IIRC there were two ways to run stuff, get your own server or get an account on a big shared computer.

> Where could you rent VMs in 2006?

I was renting a Debian VM from Bytemark in 2005 that I used to host a mail and web server. I think they were one of the first operators in the UK.

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#84

Post by cmiles8 »

AWS has lost its way.

It’s well into the IBM phase now. Primarily providing important but boring commodity infrastructure, but the top talent that can drive real innovation has long since left the building.

It’s race to stay relevant in AI but always seeming 2-3 steps behind everyone else is one such example of the current sad state of affairs.

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#85

Post by anal_reactor »

fweimer wrote: post #64
Hard_Space wrote: post #3

I used to see AI generated images with lots of unintelligible writing or misspelled words in slides, but the speaker left them in anyway. “Good enough” is not customer obsession. This enforced adoption of immature GenAI reminds me of Milo Minderbinder trying to make people eat cotton in Catch 22 , because he had inadvertently obtained a huge amount of it.

Long before GenAI, I saw people using meme generators a lot in corporate presentations. I found that equally jarring. Replacing that with GenAI stuff is probably an improvement. At least it's reducing legal risk. It seems more understandable to a global audience, too. I still don't have an explanation why people are doing this. Is it part of leadership training? Or do presenters have their own theory that including t…

People have a thing that they mimic the behavior of those above them in the hierarchy. CEO used a meme once because they thought it's funny, then everyone did this in order to mimic CEO.

Why was leetcode so popular? Because Google did it and they were the cool kids at the time.

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#86

Post by le-mark »

sscaryterry wrote: post #61
archturtle wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just happens that these very-lesser-paid workers are usually Indian, Filipino and Moroccan, I guess. And if a company goes this route, they're most likely significantly cutting costs at the expense of the provided service

It is nothing other than modern slavery.

As of about 4 years ago software developers in India were making .20 of US counter parts. I was managing a team of 7 and 5 left for higher pay elsewhere. Same has happened in China and other countries. They are not so cheap anymore.

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#87

Post by tactlesscamel »

Rekindle8090 wrote: post #19
georgemcbay wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are precedents like the Industrial Revolution. Things get worse for the workers for a generation or so. And things only got better post-Industrial Revolution when labor organized and forced the issue. There's no guarantee that will work again if labor has reduced leverage due to AI reducing their value. I think in one way or another this all works itself out, but I'm not convinced it won't be a very painful (…

The actual Industrial Revolution labor wars happened because workers were being maimed, killed, and disposed of with zero legal recourse. The Ludlow Massacre in 1914 ended with the Colorado National Guard machine-gunning a tent colony and burning women and children alive. The Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 had the United States Army bombing American coal miners from biplanes. Pinkertons routinely shot organizers. T…

You should look past the screen and see what's going on. War is not the same; violence against humanity is not the same.

You're right, it's not in the ballpark. It's at the gates. The game isn't on simply because they poisoned the opponent in the duggout.

It's time. It needs to stop now while the body count is low. This isn't about some dev getting severence. They've taken away the street sweeper position and are watching us eat each other.

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#88

Post by pards »

> When AWS first introduced a viable cloud to the world, it was amazing. Back in the 1990s when you wanted to implement an enterprise software solution, you first had to take a guess at what computing power you would need. Next, you would have to order hardware from companies like Sun Microsystems or Dell and that could take weeks if not months to be delivered. It would then need to be racked, powered and provisioned, and then you were screwed if you happened to undersize it or criticized if you spent too much and oversized it.

This is how many large enterprises still operate today. Ironically, the main argument is that it's faster to provision VMs on-prem than it is to get approval to run in the cloud.

Bureaucracy always beats tech.

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#89

Post by 1123581321 »

SilverElfin wrote: post #46
Max-Ganz-II wrote: post #40

Over the last month I contacted Support for the first time in many years. This was for a question about how billing works. It went like this; 1. Case created. 2. Unassigned for seven days. 3. Open real-time chat, talk for 25 or so minutes where I guide a first-line Indian chap who plainly doesn't know about the subject in hand and who is as we talk reading the AWS docs I've already read. At the end, just as I couldn'…

[flagged]

It’s not their race, it’s that they are completely removed from the business context, given simple resolution scripts and little power to escalate out of their call center.

When you hear the accent, you know it’s likely the business has done this, unfortunately.

Indian tech support works just fine when it’s more integrated with Indian engineering and product ownership, as support in the US would be with an American company.

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#90

Post by pards »

Max-Ganz-II wrote: post #40

Over the last month I contacted Support for the first time in many years. This was for a question about how billing works. It went like this; 1. Case created. 2. Unassigned for seven days. 3. Open real-time chat, talk for 25 or so minutes where I guide a first-line Indian chap who plainly doesn't know about the subject in hand and who is as we talk reading the AWS docs I've already read. At the end, just as I couldn'…

We recently had an issue with our production Oracle database. Our in-house DBAs spent hours trying to get the AI support bot to assign a real person to join the incident call. It took more than 2 hours to get an actual person on the call.

We literally pay hundreds of thousands a year in Oracle support contracts, and this is what we get? AI bots? Nope. Migrating to Postgres is now a top priority.

This "replace people with AI" nonsense has to stop. [0]

[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/04/06/oracles-m...

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