discodave

They bought Pillpack. They also announced a big partnership with Berkshire that went... nowhere? I also know of a big secret-project kinda effort, where they were employing research scientists, and other people with very specialized knowledge of protein design... all those people are no longer at Amazon.

Is there enough supply of treasury bonds and other low risk debt to do this?

For a start, the top level of the JSON document could be an array.

SQLite has a write ahead log (journal) mode. If you write that log to some store that is already replicated (S3, CloudFlare Durable Objects, Kafka?) then the concept of a 'master' is less important.

Since it's a relational DB, and supports transactions, you can have a journal table right?

I know of a very important system at AWS that did this with MySQL :D

This blog post goes off the rails in the second sentence.

> The crypto movement, the very rebellion that set out to defeat [WallSt/TheFed] hegemony, has provided them with the necessary new-age tech to enhance their existing order.

Like what tech do banks or the government need from the crypto crowd? Trading has been electronic for decades, the credit card networks are orders of magnitude more scalable than any blockchain, ACH exists.

Pretty sure that this filing shows he is $21 billion short on the borrowing front.

I've never seen (healthy) fleets with average CPU utilization above 70-80%. That includes several-thousand machine fleets when I worked at Amazon. Most things I've seen in my career have 10-20% utilization at best. The Lambda "premium" over EC2 is only like 30-50%, so unless your workload is super consistent/predictable, and your code/hardware is well optimized, then Lambda will likely win on price. This is even more true now that you don't have to pay for API Gateway.

Where are the borrowers investing the tokens to generate profit to pay interest to the lenders?

Like, are they investing in real estate that pays rent? Companies that pay dividends?

Do you have any examples of non-crypto companies trying to spin a $100MM fine as "pioneering efforts in securing regulatory clarity"?

I know companies spin, but this is next level.

Do you get a sign on bonus thats like 50% of TC for the first two years at other companies? Because thats what amazon does.

Is it really a common problem?

I've had a Rav4 for 3 years. I use the adaptive cruise control a lot on highway/freeway and I have never, ever had it exhibit phantom braking. It will sometimes brake a little longer than you expect for cars that are exiting on off ramps, or changing lanes, but it's always for a real car that's really going slower than I am.

I just want to applaud the author for being direct, and not couching their opinions in a bunch of caveats^1. Sometimes a little bit of directness (in good spirits) helps move discussions, and people's understanding forward.

^1: Except for the caveats in the footnotes :p

Hehe true! But it's real hard to "move fast and not break things" when you're talking about millions of servers, exabytes of data, and tens of thousands of engineers.

Yes, but many services, including S3, SQS, and DynamoDB did not run on the EC2 network for most of their existence.

> Now with your observation at AWS, I start wondering whether the coverage effort and different types of tests really help or not...

Figuring out ROI for testing is a very tricky problem. I'm glad to hear your team invests in testing. I agree it's hard to know if you're wasting money or not doing enough!

It's 2006, you work for an 'online book store' that's experimenting with this cloud thing. Are you going to build a whole new network involving multi-million dollar networking appliances?

Yeah, teams go to a lot of effort to have zonal environments/fleets/deployments... but there are still many, many regional failure modes. For example, even in a foundational service like EC2 most of their APIs touch regional databases.

I saw pleeeeeenty of untested code at Amazon/AWS. Looking back it was almost like the most important services/code had the least amount of testing. While internal boondoggle projects (I worked on a couple) had complicated test plans and debates about coverage metrics.

The AWS summary says: "As the impact to services during this event all stemmed from a single root cause, we opted to provide updates via a global banner on the Service Health Dashboard, which we have since learned makes it difficult for some customers to find information about this issue"

This seems like bad faith to me based on my experience when I worked for AWS. As they repeated many times at Re:Invent last week, they've been doing this for 15+ years. I distinctly remember seeing banners like "Don't update the dashboard without approval from <importantSVP>" on various service team runbooks. They tried not to say it out loud, but there was very much a top-down mandate for service teams to make the dashboard "look green" by:

1. Actually improving availability (this one is fair).

2. Using the "Green-I" icon rather than the blue, orange, or red icons whenever possible.

3. They built out the "Personal Health Dashboard" so they can post about many issues in there, without having to acknowledge it publicly.

Take DynamoDB as an example. The AWS managed service takes care of replicating everything to multiple AZs for you, that's great! You're very unlikely to lose your data. But, the DynamoDB team is running a mostly-regional service. If they push bad code or fall over it's likely going to be a regional issue. Probably only the storage nodes are truly zonal.

If you wanted to deploy something similar, like Cassandra across AZs, or even regions you're welcome to do that. But now you're on the hook for the availability of the system. Are you going to get higher availability running your own Cassandra implementation than the DynamoDB team? Maybe. DynamoDB had a pretty big outage in 2015 I think. But that's a lot more work than just using DynamoDB IMO.

Your application can call DynamoDB via the public endpoint (dynamodb.us-east-1.amazonaws.com). But if you're in a VPC (i.e. practically all AWS workloads in 2021), you have to route to the internet (you need public subnet(s) I think) to make that call.

VPC Endpoints create a DynamoDB endpoint in your VPC, from the documentation:

"When you create a VPC endpoint for DynamoDB, any requests to a DynamoDB endpoint within the Region (for example, dynamodb.us-west-2.amazonaws.com) are routed to a private DynamoDB endpoint within the Amazon network. You don't need to modify your applications running on EC2 instances in your VPC. The endpoint name remains the same, but the route to DynamoDB stays entirely within the Amazon network, and does not access the public internet."

You're overthinking it, and Code Pipeline is just one example. As I'm writing this they have close to 300 services!!! Many of them, maybe hundreds of them just straight up lose money.

The Corey Quinn number I keep quoting is that >60% of AWS revenue for large (>100MM) accounts is EC2. That jives with what I hear from people in the industry.

That means that the other 250+ services are splitting less than 40% of AWS revenue....

An underestimated chunk of AWSs costs is people. They employ >50k people, and likely have a salary bill of several billion dollars, a significant portion of revenue.

50,000 x 250k = 12.5B

Also, they do cross-subsidize, because many AWS services are either hardly used (CodePipeline) or free (CloudFormation) and the cost to run those services is non-negligible.

Pretty sure that none of the honest and upstanding people in the crypto-world would attempt to circumvent regulations like that!

/s

Does that mean they don't try to prevent a group of individuals coordinating wash trading between their accounts?

This quote is [chefs kiss]:

> Here's a metaphor. Blockchains today are like… XML in the early 2000s. A long-burning overcomplicated trash fire that a bunch of large, cash-rich, unscrupulous, consultant-filled mega-organizations foisted on us for years and years, that we all now pretend we weren’t dumb enough to fall for. Remember SOAP? Remember when we tried to make HTML4 into XHTML? Ew, no.

To answer your question, here are some suggestions for what might be the JSON of blockchain:

* Git - Cryptographic hashing, Merkle trees, and distributed architecture (pre-GitHub) to record a history of events.

* Databases (SQL, NoSQL, NewSQL) - Have been running the entire fincancial system for several decades.

* Credit cards - ubiquitous electronica payments "Credit card was the most used payment method in the United States in 2020, with 38 percent of point of sale payments being made by credit card." - statista.com

* Apple/Samsung/Google Pay & friends.

Technically Nikola gave us the truck rolling down the hill. Hindenburg just let us find out about it.

:)

This is actually a great way to think about it for a number of reasons.

1. Look up what James Hamilton (AWS Distinguished Engineer) has been saying for years about commodity economics disrupting things. It's about the money, stupid.

2. The way AWS has been building out their ecosystem is following a lot of the previous monopolists (Microsoft) playbook. Get other companies to be 'partners' in your ecosystem so they depend on your platform? Check. Training and certification so technologists are tied to your platform? Check, and so on.

3. Amazon and AWS are usually never playing the game people think they are. For example, all the years that people questioned Amazons profits, they were doing their best to hide profits with massive R&D & other investments.

In the case of CloudFlare attacking AWS network/bandwidth pricing, it's worth pointing out that >60% of AWS revenue comes from EC2!!!! S3, and CloudFront is (relatively) small fries.

Yes.

Amazon offer generally gives you roughly the same "total compensation" for the first 4 years, assuming that the stock price doesn't change much.

So if they're trying to pay you 300k per year, then you get 160k salary, ~140k starting bonus each of the first two years, and ~300k of stock that mostly vests in years 3 and 4.