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Dear AWS, please let me be a cloud engineer again
- jhealy 2y agoRelated content: Corey Quinn on the AWS GenAI obsession https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/amazon-genai-services/ https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/amazon-genai-services/
- tootie 2y agoI have to say I find their GenAI offerings muddled at best. I genuinely don't understand what Bedrock is trying to solve.
- refulgentis 2y agoRecursive doom loop, we need to mirror everyone else's models at the same price and add Enterprise™ verbiage*, lest Wall Street say we don't have a story. Ironically, trying to compete like that, and then focusing on that, causes the problem they're trying to avoid IMHO. They're always going to be third as long as MS gets to serve OpenAI and Google has in-house AI talent building models that are top-tier competitive. And if you set this one farking thing aside, they're #1. * ex. first time I've seen "FM" as an acronym is on the page you link. they mean "foundation model", which itself is a term I'm likely to see in the Economist, but never on HN. Colloquially, it means "big AI like ChatGPT"*
- atypeoferror 2y agoNot sure about Bedrock, but I used Q to write some Python code, and I have to say - it was pretty good. Even ended up covering an edge case I didn't think of. In the end it was all pretty basic (walking a directory tree and compiling some analytics on content) - but it saved me time and I never felt frustrated with it. My anecdotal $0.02
- refulgentis 2y agoHear hear. I'm a founder of a GenAI startup, left Google to do it. And yet, cannot believe how much debasement has occurred, and trust has been lost, by every. single. product. and. company. thinking it has to have an AI story, and it has to be the story. c.f. Google IO keynote this year. I couldn't tell you a single thing Google is launching this year, beyond limited, rushed features where Gemini chat is in a side pane. And that's not on me: it's because Google literally didn't talk about a single other thing. And as usual, Google is out of touch and doesn't get the joke, c.f. at the end, Sundar presenting their own count of how many times they said AI. I sorely miss tech industry of the 00s, I simply cannot imagine ex. 2000 Apple/Steve Jobs falling for this. There's this weird vapid MBA brain drain in charge everywhere. But hey, stonk goes up.
- mattgreenrocks 2y ago> And that's not on me: it's because Google literally didn't talk about a single other thing. Most tech companies don't have a whole lot to show right now, so AI sucks up all the oxygen in the room. This becomes a feedback loop with the stock market, too. > There's this weird vapid MBA brain drain in charge everywhere. Yep. And Apple's playing along as well. Their latest WWDC presentation has the most weird tone I've ever seen in their presentations ever: "we added some AI features and they're pretty cool I guess...also it's super private! Here's all the ways it's kept private." So much hedging going on. So little excitement. Because they're just playing to someone else's tune, and they're not good at doing that.
- refulgentis 2y ago2004 Apple with AI: we need to get 100 people locked down and working on Finder 2.0 with this, and keep execs focused on reviewing it wholeheartedly. this year, let's lol at vista security via confirmation dialogs, vs our best in class OS. 2024 Apple with AI: this is our best year ever. Look at our CTOs hair. We fixed Siri being eons behind, now if it thinks ChatGPT can help you can tap a confirmation dialogue.
- hnlmorg 2y ago> I simply cannot imagine ex. 2000 Apple/Steve Jobs falling for this. I wouldnt be so quick to assume that. Let’s not forget that Jobs bought Siri and then integrated it into every platform they sold. AI has been a buzzword for literally decades. It’s just exploding in popularity right now because the capabilities of GenAI have recently exploded. It’s a little like how VR and AR has been around for decades. It’s just taken this long for the technology to make mixed reality a possibility for the masses.
- refulgentis 2y agoYeah, def not arguing my paycheck is thin air -- its that there's a surface level-only respect for it. "Eyewash", in baseball parlance.
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- ko_pivot 2y agoI think the main issue here is brand and growth. AWS needs to convince CIOs/CEOs to use them over Azure/GCP, not engineers. And even if AWS cared about convincing engineers, we already prefer AWS so introducing new services for container orchestration wouldn’t move the needle. What does move the needle is being perceived by enterprise leadership teams as just as cutting edge as the competitors. “Generative AI” is the only signal those teams understand these days.
- layer8 2y agoIf this is true, software engineering leadership is highly dysfunctional, and that should be an issue of major concern.
- marcosdumay 2y agoWelcome to some professional circle somewhere on the world at the 21th century.
- 8organicbits 2y agoIt's strange because as a senior engineer I'm telling everyone that genAI is not ready, has glaring quality, safety, and security issues, is underpriced by VCs planning to crank prices later, and even if the magic was real offers less promise than tried and true conventional solutions we haven't tried yet. AWS should be spending significant time explaining how their giant portfolio of conventional tools are improving. If they have stopped, they've lost focus. But hopefully it's just the marketing team focused on magic beans.
- roncesvalles 2y ago>AWS should be spending significant time explaining how their giant portfolio of conventional tools are improving. See but that won't work because leaders are dumb. The central tension of civilization is that the smart ones are needed down in the boiler/operating room to solve complex low-level problems, and whoever's left must steer the ship.
- pram 2y agoTBH AWS re:Invent is frequently like that. In 2017 or so there was an absurd amount of “Alexa integration” events that were completely useless. I get the sentiment but, you know, it’s really just a giant marketing and pre-sales exercise.
- jfengel 2y agoI didn't get it. All of the new features they're adding are for AI, but the old features still exist, right? If nobody wants you to use them, is that because everyone already has as much conventional architecture as they need? Perhaps the new opportunities are all in AI because we've pushed conventional stuff as far as it could go, and we were just rearranging deck chairs. I'll be honest that, if we've run out of ideas, I dunno if AI really solves any problems I want solved. But even if not I don't see how appealing to AWS fixes anything.
- oaiey 2y agoClouds/PaaSs are just at the beginning at their evolvement. Writing apps is still far too complicated. So, I do not belief that clouds are at the end of their innovation.
- 8organicbits 2y ago> Perhaps the new opportunities are all in AI because we've pushed conventional stuff as far as it could go, and we were just rearranging deck chairs. There's a ton of low hanging fruit in all the cloud vendor products. Look outside AWS at tailscale, vercel, and fly.io for some obvious examples.
- crabmusket 2y agoFTA, > The same goes for feature releases. If the vast bulk of all new feature releases are geared towards GenAI, it implicitly means AWS is rerouting investments from classic infrastructure to shiny GenAI. It means that the products I love get smaller budgets. It means that the products I use will not get the next feature I want, or only at a slower pace. I think the article does hyperbolize a bit, but this seems like a hard truth. Unless AWS has hired an entirely new swathe of AI-focused engineering talent, or if their public face at events is significantly disconnected from where they're spending their real money.
- Aeolun 2y agoAWS can do a lot of boring work in homogenizing their offering. Why does ALB connect to a Fargate instance, but API gateway does not. Why can you use a public HTTP gateway, but not in a VPC? All this stuff would make my life so much better than any form of genAI.
- game_the0ry 2y agoI feel I am going to be downvoted for this, but... I think the technical specialty that will be most at threat from automation by AI would be the exact job that he authored has -- solutions engineers that build commodity cloud infra on AWS, Azure, G cloud, etc. Look at progressions and range of abstraction between standard sys admin IT work to serverless deployments, especially with IaaC tools. You can describe your architecture to chatGPT and it can spit out a CloudFormation YAML. It will be rudimentary and poor, but I could see a Gen AI tool offered by cloud providers where al you do is describe your app and then deployed infra on your behalf, and optimize form there. Not trying to talk down on folks who do this type of work, but sharing my opinion on where I think the author is ultimately coming from.
- pylua 2y agoServerless, architectless, and programmerless.
- 8organicbits 2y ago> the technical specialty that will be most at threat from automation by AI Can you point to any actual AI product in this space that functions? Everything I've seen is like, if you squint then it kinda looks like it's doing something, but it's actually producing something embarrassingly wrong, unsafe, or otherwise unusable. And no, having a SME repeatedly prompt until it does the right thing doesn't really make sense. If we're just talking about hypothetical tools that someone could make, but haven't, we're talking about magic.
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- lolinder 2y ago> Then there was AWS re:Inforce – the annual security conference – which was themed “Security in the era of generative AI”. This tagline is representative of every part of the hype around GenAI. It makes it sound like security has fundamentally changed and we all need to re-learn what we know. Everything to do with GenAI is treated like this: we need new security plans, we need AI Engineers as a new job title, we need to completely reevaluate our corporate strategies. Security in the world of generative AI is not substantially different than infosec has been for a while now: User prompts are untrusted input. Model outputs are untrusted input. Treat untrusted input appropriately, and you'll be fine. The same goes for "AI engineers", who are in the business of wiring up APIs to each other like any other backend engineer. We take data from one black box and transfer it to another black box. Sometimes a black box takes a very long time to respond. It's what we've always done with many different kinds of black boxes, and the engineering challenges are mostly solved problems. The only thing that's really new is that the API of these new black boxes is a prompt instead of a deterministic interface. Don't get me wrong, there will be things that will be different in the post-LLM world. But my goodness do the current crop of companies overestimate how large that difference will be.
- sylens 2y agoWhile that was indeed billed as the theme of reInforce, there were plenty of sessions and workshops that did not involve GenAI at all. There was a great chalk talk about the underpinnings of how the AWS IAM service works across services and regions, for example.
- fragmede 2y ago> Your first leadership principle is customer obsession: “Leaders start with the customer and work backwards”. > I’m your customer, and I’m begging you: please let me be a cloud engineer again. Only AWS knows how many H100 GPUs they have, how busy they are. How many people are paying for them, how many people want them and can't get them, and how many people just don't care at all. It's possible that the focus on GenAI for Re:Invent 2023 wasn't based on any hard data like that, and is really just up to the whims of Adam Selipsky since Jassy moved over, but maybe someone who better knows their planning process can comment.
- dtech 2y agoBusinesses don't always act like perfectly rational actors, bubbles are a thing.
- fuzztester 2y agoright. see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40958438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40958438
- LarsDu88 2y agoYou make it out as if all the executives at AWS have some master plan surrounding the probably absurd number of GPUs they bought, but the likely answer is its just a bunch of fallible people bandwagoning on the latest trend.
- hnlmorg 2y agoI’d wager AWS makes more money from GenAI than any other domain. So it makes financial sense for them to sell that part of the business hard at the moment. This opinion is based on admittedly anecdotal experience, but I’ve worked in a large range of domains on AWS over the years and by far the biggest AWS bills were for startups specialising in GenAI.
- AgentOrange1234 2y agoInteresting. I figured all their AI efforts were motivated by FOMO rather than actual returns. Why is AI stuff making so much money? Wouldn’t a new area like AI be a loss leader as they try to get market share?
- pylua 2y agoThis is just in general true of generative ai. In many ways it commoditizes skilled labor. They do not care about people in the posters situation. It is meant to lower the bar and make the labor cheaper.
- skrebbel 2y agoI don't know, if you get existential worries about your job because one supplier jumps on a hype bandwagon at a few conferences, then aren't you a bit too married to that supplier? I don't mean from a company perspective, I mean personally. I don't understand how AWS conference topics prevent anyone from being a cloud engineer.
- tuyguntn 2y agowhen a company focus and strategy shifts to a single domain/product, everything else gets impacted. Enhancements expected by the community will be delayed, engineers need to come up with temporary solutions which needs to be rewritten next year, new ways of solving problems will not be shared, new content will be created only for a couple of products.
- lijok 2y agoAn "AWS Serverless Hero" is upset AWS are acting vain around their AI posturing.
- kayo_20211030 2y agotouché
- cperciva 2y agoAWS is way too bandwagonny these days. Back when it was all engineers they built things on the basis of "this is cool technology". These days marketing runs large parts of AWS and plans are decided more on the basis of "this will look cool on a PowerPoint slide". I keep going back to the basics: Serverless is servers. Machine learning is servers. GenAI is servers. And, from what I've heard, most of AWS revenue is servers and storage. (For the record: I am also an AWS Hero, and an AWS customer since 2006.)
- zdragnar 2y agoTo be fair, most of that criticism was also applied to "the cloud" and most AWS services that weren't reserved EC2 instances back in the day.
- fragmede 2y agoHow is Lamda, servers? Obviously it is underneath but because there's all sorts of weird tuning shit to get them to work right, it's is own separate thing to deal with and so deserves some sort of way to differentiate it. Are we just unable to handle new definitions for new, different things?
- NicoJuicy 2y agoLambda is servers like kubernetes is servers
- catlifeonmars 2y agoHaving worked on both (servers and serverless), I personally find the serverless programming model to be fundamentally different. I don’t have time to write, operate or troubleshoot servers. Serverless is a huge productivity boost. I can set and forget some glue piece of functionality and it will operate without the issue. Then I can focus coding up the interesting and differentiated bits.
- Brechreiz 2y agoI have a python script that fetches a website every few minutes and makes an API call when some conditions are met. I never really figured out all those other AWS or cloud tools and usually just resort to renting a vortual server and running the script via ssh.
- whirlwin 2y agoGood reflections. It kind of remind me of the big data era where everything needed to revolve around big data. However, what happened is that it became apparent that not everything needs to be big data. Business needs will shine through as they always have and dictate what is truly important. I'm not afraid of the wave of gen AI. Think of it as the new power tool that just came out that everyone's currently talking about. You'll add it to your toolbox because you don't want to be obsolete. It'll blend into everything else once the hype wave is over.
- mtnGoat 2y agoThey are using AI to help drive this dead horse… gotta have lots of data to build AI, they claim.
- roncesvalles 2y agoI'm just going to say it: Gen AI is a complete and total nothingburger.
- shermantanktop 2y agoCurrent SOTA genAI tech is more than capable of generating a comment like that - no insight, just a “+1” comment dressed up as an emperor-has-no-clothes hot take for an audience that already agrees with it. So that’s not nothing.
- moltar 2y agoAWS really feels they were left behind so they are overcorrecting a bit. In private they are truly thirsty for AI applications they can write uses cases on that they even offer upwards of 100K credits for Gen AI purposes only.
- hetpatel572669 2y agoAWS mainly earns from new modern managed services because ppl do not want to manage anything and AWS does it for them. All those services are too expensive and AWS markets those and keep talking about those as conventional managed services have less margin.
- Eduard 2y agoit's not only cloud services. The AI hype has hit self-hosted services and "normal" / "offline-first" applications as well. For example, the team / leadership / foundation behind Home Assistant has been pushing AI features hard in the past 18 months or so. This coincides with my feeling that there hasn't been any relevant improvement in Home Assistant's core features and usability — it's in stagnation for over a year now. This is of course my own opinion, but it makes sense: if a significant share of resources is spent on AI stuff, that share is not available anymore for other needs.
- crabmusket 2y agoThis is why we need small company and community owned and run software, preferably open source. Zulip's post about their policies regarding AI training rubbed some the wrong way due to its perceived anti-Slack positioning, but it was at least sensible and measured. Venture backed businesses are all vulnerable to investor desire to chase fads in the name of speculative returns.
- xescure 2y agoWhat features do you want from Home Assistant?
- Androider 2y agoAWS is desperate to climb up the value stack. Compute and networking is a commodity (with fat margins at retail prices to be sure), and the second and third place providers are willing to make deep discounts to land big deals. That's not going to justify those future lofty valuations. The problem is, for all it's talk over the last few years, AWS remains a complete non-player in the GenAI space, much less so than Azure. In my opinion the problem is exactly the same as for every other high-level service they've tried to launch. QuickSight, Lex, Polly, Cognito, CodeGuru, SageMaker, etc: they're not good. Nobody ever said "I really like QuickSight, I sure wish it had GenAI capabilities". So when the hastily-expanded QuickSight team(s) then goes on to release 42 different Q enabled SKUs, nobody cares. For various reasons, AWS is organizationally incapable of launching a non-infrastructure product that is simply great, as doing so would take attention to detail and deeply caring about things like UX which are anathema to Amazon. On the positive side, GenAI model access will be commoditized and part of the basic undifferentiated cloud infra, and AWS will do fine there.
- shell_game 2y agoHere here. Couldn’t have described AWS better.
- Aeolun 2y ago> AWS is organizationally incapable of launching a non-infrastructure product that is simply great I’d argue that nothing AWS launches is great at launch. The good products we actually use have all been around for 10+ years.
- AtlasBarfed 2y agoLike the aws console?
- Aeolun 2y agoI think that’s more like 200 products all launched at a different time using a different methodology?
- andrewstuart 2y agoGo experience the joy of becoming a Linux engineer, where you need the permission of no-one to practice your craft.
- nunez 2y agoI finally went to an AWS event this year: the AWS Summit in DC. It was an awesome (and awesomely overwhelming) experience, but I completely agree with the author. GenAI EVERYWHERE. The other topics that the author brought up from re:Invent 2022 were still present, but not without heavy mentions of how AI contributes to them. That said, I have some predictions that might make OP happier. DevOps and Platform Engineering is still a hot topic, especially in a world where companies are repatriating back to the data center (or are at least going hybrid). All of the 2010s bare metal tech (Foreman, Ansible, etc) are going to come back in big ways, and Kubernetes consumption will only increase. eBPF and systems engineering is still hot and will really help here for high-performance observability. Companies that won't repatriate or want to use the cloud for prototyping will want to focus on cost optimization. This requires serious cloud engineering skills (using spot instances and S3 lifecycle policies is table stakes; much more can be done, especially on reporting and automation). GenAI will help here (super helpful for analyzing time series data and surfacing patterns), but having the fundamentals will always be useful here.
- AtlasBarfed 2y agoIf you are engineering around spot instances,just go to a cheaper cloud already.
- diegof79 2y agoThe last sentences of the article say: > Your first leadership principle is customer obsession: “Leaders start with the customer and work backwards”. > I’m your customer, and I’m begging you: please let me be a cloud engineer again. However, as with many enterprise products, the author is not the customer; it’s the user. The customers are the companies that buy AWS because it’s an essential technology for their strategy. When the whole tech world is talking about generative AI, they want to be there, and Azure seems to be ahead because of the MS deal with OpenAI. (even if they are not ahead, customers' perception matters most). So basically, what Amazon is trying to do by making all of these conferences and announcements about GenAI is to send a message to their customers: we are ahead on the wave of GenAI and you can still trust that our products are going to help you be on the hype.
- up2isomorphism 2y agoIt is one of those typical moments for all big corp when fight for customer is less important than fight internally for employee survival. In this case, AI is the tag to keep oneself "relevant" and in the job.
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