AWS specifically reported 20% YoY revenue growth, which is the lowest it's ever been since they started reporting the numbers publicly.
I know I have.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure what the "accounting trick" is though, except in the sense that anything involving money or finance is an accounting trick. Can you elaborate?