3 ms·

AWS specifically reported 20% YoY revenue growth, which is the lowest it's ever been since they started reporting the numbers publicly.

ElevenLathe 4y ago
Teams at every single AWS customer, big and small, have probably spent the last quarter finding and ending wasteful, forgotten spend lurking in their cloud footprint in a desperate attempt to prove to their MBAs that they shouldn't be in the next round of layoffs because they just saved the company 10x their salary in cloud spend. I know I have.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  > they just saved the company 10x their salary in cloud spend. Great. Thanks for doing that. Now that we have got our cloud costs manageable, the next biggest expense is people! What did you say you did again? Oh, you're our cloud cost reduction guy? I don't think we need your skills anymore, that's not a problem anymore.
  - ElevenLathe 4y ago
    I've had that thought too, but I'm playing a tactical game rather than a strategic one at this point. The name of the game is to survive the next few quarters. Also, there is a team whose job /is/ cloud cost reduction but all they ever seem to do is spend /more/ on enormously huge Glue jobs, Athena queries, etc.
    - lumost 4y ago
      The snake eats its own tail? This is why layoffs are imprecise, everyone starts pointing fingers. If the cloud cost reduction team only ever increased costs for 2-3 years... then there is a leadership problem for letting it continue. Otherwise the cloud cost reduction team probably was doing something else for leadership.
      - ElevenLathe 4y ago
        Not pointing fingers (it's not my money they're spending keeping the other team in business), just saying that if the logic is "actually, our cloud spend looks better than ever, maybe we can lay off the people whose job it is to do that?" then they are not looking at me because I have a different title. My big saves are all in the category of "I was in there anyway and noticed that X was enabled. Do we need that on?" so I look like a thoughtful engineer who is alert for waste. Anyway all of this is a bit of a joke obviously. I know that layoff decisions aren't going to be made based on looking at individual people, or even teams. Still, it can't really hurt me to save my employer money (as long as it isn't my own salary, or my colleagues' salary), especially in a tough macro environment. Perhaps I'm even saving some significant amount of emissions and therefore marginally delaying the end of all human life, or marginally reducing demand for energy at a time when it's tight. Thousands of engineers doing the same all at once can probably significantly hurt the hyperscalers' business though.
  - leanstartupnoob 4y ago
    > Oh, you're our cloud cost reduction guy? I don't think we need your skills anymore, that's not a problem anymore. That's a somewhat cynical view, but I'm sure there are plenty of other MBAs looking for people with proven experience cutting cloud costs.
    - sebazzz 4y ago
      I know how you can cut cloud costs. It doesn't involve the big4 cloud.
  - gregshap 4y ago
    This, except it's the MBA+5 talking to the MBA+2
- simplotek 4y ago
  > Teams at every single AWS customer, big and small, have probably spent the last quarter finding and ending wasteful, forgotten spend lurking in their cloud footprint The interesting thing about cloud costs for companies like Amazon or AWS is that in the short term it's only an accounting trick. The company is not spending money if there's a lambda deployed somewhere, or a EC3 instance idling. It's nice to erode revenue in the books from these expenses, but it's not like Besos needs to reach out of his wallet to cover the cost of a container launched by some random team at Amazon. At most he moves the cash from one pocket to the other and there's that.
  - ElevenLathe 4y ago
    Well, they don't need to spend money to schedule my Lambda, but they did already spend a bunch of money building out the datacenter so they can pick up my 100th of a nickel when they do schedule it. AWS is kind of like a bank, making money on the spread between the cost of compute at different time scales. They can get cheap compute (by committing to owning datacenters and filling them with silicon) and sell expensive compute by letting customers buy it by the second. This is a great business if the demand for per-second compute is always rising, but it isn't if all your customers suddenly take you up on it all at once and start spending drastically less but your huge datacenter investment is still illiquid.
    - simplotek 4y ago
      > Well, they don't need to spend money to schedule my Lambda, but they did already spend a bunch of money building out the datacenter so they can pick up my 100th of a nickel when they do schedule it. A projected revenue drop is not the same as a loss though. You already bought that computer. Less so if it's your own company who was using their stuff. Worst case scenario: they have stuff idling and more headroom to accommodate demand. Heck, why waste more money building yet another data center if the ones already in place have already plenty of cycles rand bandwidth to spare? It's all an accounting trick. You don't waste more power. You don't have to but more hardware. Turning off your lambda saves nothing.
      - 4y ago
- esskay 4y ago
  Yep we did the same. Saved about 10k/mo by clearing out old junk we dont need anymore and consolodating things.
nicoburns 4y ago
I don't understand why this is considered anything other than normal. It's not possible for companies to continue growing forever and it's innevitable that growth will start to slow as the company matures.

ElevenLathe 4y ago

Teams at every single AWS customer, big and small, have probably spent the last quarter finding and ending wasteful, forgotten spend lurking in their cloud footprint in a desperate attempt to prove to their MBAs that they shouldn't be in the next round of layoffs because they just saved the company 10x their salary in cloud spend. I know I have.

londons_explore 4y ago
> they just saved the company 10x their salary in cloud spend. Great. Thanks for doing that. Now that we have got our cloud costs manageable, the next biggest expense is people! What did you say you did again? Oh, you're our cloud cost reduction guy? I don't think we need your skills anymore, that's not a problem anymore.
- ElevenLathe 4y ago
  I've had that thought too, but I'm playing a tactical game rather than a strategic one at this point. The name of the game is to survive the next few quarters. Also, there is a team whose job /is/ cloud cost reduction but all they ever seem to do is spend /more/ on enormously huge Glue jobs, Athena queries, etc.
  - lumost 4y ago
    The snake eats its own tail? This is why layoffs are imprecise, everyone starts pointing fingers. If the cloud cost reduction team only ever increased costs for 2-3 years... then there is a leadership problem for letting it continue. Otherwise the cloud cost reduction team probably was doing something else for leadership.
    - ElevenLathe 4y ago
      Not pointing fingers (it's not my money they're spending keeping the other team in business), just saying that if the logic is "actually, our cloud spend looks better than ever, maybe we can lay off the people whose job it is to do that?" then they are not looking at me because I have a different title. My big saves are all in the category of "I was in there anyway and noticed that X was enabled. Do we need that on?" so I look like a thoughtful engineer who is alert for waste. Anyway all of this is a bit of a joke obviously. I know that layoff decisions aren't going to be made based on looking at individual people, or even teams. Still, it can't really hurt me to save my employer money (as long as it isn't my own salary, or my colleagues' salary), especially in a tough macro environment. Perhaps I'm even saving some significant amount of emissions and therefore marginally delaying the end of all human life, or marginally reducing demand for energy at a time when it's tight. Thousands of engineers doing the same all at once can probably significantly hurt the hyperscalers' business though.
- leanstartupnoob 4y ago
  > Oh, you're our cloud cost reduction guy? I don't think we need your skills anymore, that's not a problem anymore. That's a somewhat cynical view, but I'm sure there are plenty of other MBAs looking for people with proven experience cutting cloud costs.
  - sebazzz 4y ago
    I know how you can cut cloud costs. It doesn't involve the big4 cloud.
- gregshap 4y ago
  This, except it's the MBA+5 talking to the MBA+2
simplotek 4y ago
> Teams at every single AWS customer, big and small, have probably spent the last quarter finding and ending wasteful, forgotten spend lurking in their cloud footprint The interesting thing about cloud costs for companies like Amazon or AWS is that in the short term it's only an accounting trick. The company is not spending money if there's a lambda deployed somewhere, or a EC3 instance idling. It's nice to erode revenue in the books from these expenses, but it's not like Besos needs to reach out of his wallet to cover the cost of a container launched by some random team at Amazon. At most he moves the cash from one pocket to the other and there's that.
- ElevenLathe 4y ago
  Well, they don't need to spend money to schedule my Lambda, but they did already spend a bunch of money building out the datacenter so they can pick up my 100th of a nickel when they do schedule it. AWS is kind of like a bank, making money on the spread between the cost of compute at different time scales. They can get cheap compute (by committing to owning datacenters and filling them with silicon) and sell expensive compute by letting customers buy it by the second. This is a great business if the demand for per-second compute is always rising, but it isn't if all your customers suddenly take you up on it all at once and start spending drastically less but your huge datacenter investment is still illiquid.
  - simplotek 4y ago
    > Well, they don't need to spend money to schedule my Lambda, but they did already spend a bunch of money building out the datacenter so they can pick up my 100th of a nickel when they do schedule it. A projected revenue drop is not the same as a loss though. You already bought that computer. Less so if it's your own company who was using their stuff. Worst case scenario: they have stuff idling and more headroom to accommodate demand. Heck, why waste more money building yet another data center if the ones already in place have already plenty of cycles rand bandwidth to spare? It's all an accounting trick. You don't waste more power. You don't have to but more hardware. Turning off your lambda saves nothing.
    - 4y ago
esskay 4y ago
Yep we did the same. Saved about 10k/mo by clearing out old junk we dont need anymore and consolodating things.

nicoburns 4y ago

I don't understand why this is considered anything other than normal. It's not possible for companies to continue growing forever and it's innevitable that growth will start to slow as the company matures.