AWS staff spending ‘much of their time ’optimizing customers' clouds'

This is more of a side effect of providing self-support solutions, and a trend in Customer Support departments. Amazon Support has been on top of the lists and awards for best support because they have proper KPIs that incentive customer retention&#x2F;satisfaction over just number of contacts resolved.<p>So when you have good support&#x2F;sales staff and most contacts are solved with self-service, what remains are contacts about complicated cases and inquiries.<p>I imagine that they always had a lot of contacts about optimizing spending, and policies to help and retain those customers accordingly, and now the percentage of time spent in those is higher, probably because the other types of contacts are now self-service.

This sounds like a good thing. I work for a &lt;1000 employee firm, and AFAIK we&#x27;re spending in 6 figures monthly with AWS. I cannot even imagine what huge places spend there.<p>All it takes is bad support, severe price undercutting, or degrading service and we&#x27;re off to another, or a split. By having people at least feign caring, giving support, and giving suggestions, they&#x27;re locking us in and getting way more back in revenue than what it&#x27;s costing them, at least from us.

The original promise of the cloud was that it was cheaper than on prem. For many companies this has turned out not to be the case. Having worked on a cost optimization product for the past year (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vantage.sh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vantage.sh</a>) my belief is that the cloud _is_ cheaper than on prem but it is difficult to configure it to be so.<p>In particular it is difficult and stressful to understand all the knobs to turn within each cloud provider. It&#x27;s a very AWS thing to put a lot of effort into lowering their customers&#x27; bills and I do think it makes for longer lasting business relationships.

Not just their &quot;clouds&quot; but their &quot;cloud spend&quot;.<p>From the article:<p>&gt; Amazon Web Services sales and support teams are currently “spending much of their time helping customers optimize their AWS spend so they can better weather this uncertain economy.”

I was in Google Cloud&#x27;s partner org for &gt;7 years, managing a team of solution architects pointed at our most strategic partners (Accenture, Deloitte, Infosys, HCL, TCS, etc). I have been saying for nearly the entirety of the time that the way things will pan out for hyperscalers is going to roughly look like this:<p>AWS = the bazaar of public clouds. A service for nearly everything, but WYSIWYG and quality &amp; consistency will be all over the place, just like amazon.com has become.<p>Azure = will ultimately own the enterprise. Microsoft is the new IBM and their mature GTM and Professional Services organizations will carry increasing value as cloud services become mostly commoditized. Microsoft has multiple large revenue streams to fund disruptive acquisitions and these will bear fruit through good management. Satya is proving to be an exceptional CEO.<p>GCP = an also-ran on compute&#x2F;network&#x2F;storage, but potentially differentiated on data, analytics &amp; AI if leadership can organize the troops and keep focus on things that matter. Still very rough on the GTM side, and late to the party, making enterprise sales that much harder. Has some unique strengths, but can&#x27;t rest on its laurels. Execution and focus are key.<p>Oracle = Making a killing selling an easy-button-to-cloud to existing Oracle on-prem customers, and frankly, this is plenty to keep things moving forward for a while.<p>IBM = Lots of hopes &amp; dreams associated with RedHat acquisition and GBS&#x2F;GTS split. It&#x27;s still a bit early to tell how things will pan out, but IBM isn&#x27;t playing the same sport as the rest, and has a lot more in common with Oracle than the big three.<p>My prediction for the next couple of years is that AWS continues to lose market share due to QoS and ultimately being spread too thin (and alienating partners), and all the rest capture it. MSFT is the biggest winner, Google will eventually find a sweet spot (it&#x27;s already in the &quot;too big to fail&quot; category, and will achieve profitability this year), and ORCL&#x2F;IBM will see increasing success in their niches but largely avoid direct competition&#x2F;comparison with the others.

1. At which point does it become cheaper for AWS to offer discounts to customers rather than optimizing their spend?<p>2. At which point does it become cheaper for AWS to just simplify their pricing structure?

Personally, this is what I expect of them, specifically for smaller orgs that don&#x27;t have CISO, SRE or other ops folks needed.<p>Now, I&#x27;m not saying this should be the expected behavior for everyone or every situation, but &quot;aws staff spends majority of time doing what aws staff is hired and skilled to do&quot;<p>Seems pretty &quot;cost of doing business&quot; to me

A few weeks back helped someone move from EC2&#x2F;ELB&#x2F;RDS to Lightsail Vm&#x2F;LB&#x2F;Database The same app and stuff, but the price is now fixed[0]. So many apps can use something like Lightsail and cut costs. I am surprised AWS don&#x27;t promote lightsail. They also have a weird OS selection and still have CentOS 8, which is no longer supported. They treat Lightsail as a second-class citizen.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;lightsail&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;lightsail&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;</a>

Isn&#x27;t that the point? &quot;Don&#x27;t build your own infrastructure, outsource to the cloud!&quot; has been the rally call for a decade. It&#x27;s the entire reason &quot;the cloud&quot; has any value at all, beyond renting at hardware depreciation rates. Someone else is there maintaining the data center, managing failover, ensuring uptime, etc. by contract.<p>This press release could easily be interpreted as AWS backpedaling on a commitment to maintain its infrastructure.

They still have plenty of time to cripple their UI though

We’ll see if it stays this way, but the goal of ProServe and Enterprise Support is to ensure business outcomes rather than directly drive cloud spend.

We have some kind of k8s cluster that&#x27;s just locked into a state where we can&#x27;t delete it because of some wacky dependencies that no one at the company understands (it was set up by others). So at some point we&#x27;ll reach out to amazon to have them wipe it.<p>It&#x27;s kind of a messy product.

Now if only they&#x27;d spend time optimizing their management APIs and SDKs so they were more coherent.<p>I do not like using the console or having to login to the web portal, but there are things you just can&#x27;t do from the SDK, or at least, I haven&#x27;t figured out the right way to do them yet. Entirely Byzantine.<p>I wonder if they&#x27;ll ever get around to addressing the mountain of complaints folks have about local dev and emulators too.

The title has two grammatical errors with quotes. The corrected form would be:<p>&gt; AWS staff spending ‘much of their time’ optimizing customers&#x27; clouds

We had a RDS db running at 100% when typical traffic is say 40&#x2F;50%.<p>Support never found the solution, we had to scale up and out and completely replace the db two times for performance to return to the baseline.<p>All costed about 10k for what was essentially an aws bug.

I believe the next wave of SaaS is products that provide custom deployment, operational support, and cost optimization, where specialist software orgs can provide standard efficiencies and engage AWS for deeper looks.

Use vanilla products (K8S, &quot;RDS&quot;, ...) so you can always dangle the threat of going on-prem or to another cloud provider.<p>Once you use Lambdas and other deep AWS product, you&#x27;re locked in.

Of course. AWS apps are a mess and needlessly over complicated. Even if sales went on they&#x27;d still spend more time untangling the mess they&#x27;ve made for their clients.

IBM&#x27;s Hybrid Cloud concept is promising.<p>Run your sensitive or expensive bulk resources like dbs onprem and go cloud for the rest. You can often save big just bringing your db onsite.

If AWS wants to stop doing this, AWS can prioritize making optimizations easier for the customer to do...

are there enterprise grade products that don&#x27;t end up spending a large amount of time providing enterprise services?

this is not new. AWS support would always help with this.

Lol optimize to help the customer or Amazon?

TL;DR: they want to rip you off less aggressively, so you don&#x27;t ditch them on the short term.<p>Cloud computing has become so expensive that so many companies are moving away from it. And for good reason.<p>The only providers that are actually reasonable on pricing at the moment are OVH and Hetzner... by an order of magnitude (or two) cheaper than Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, Vercel, etc.<p>Trusting for any of the latter companies to not rip you off is like trusting a wolf to take care of the sheep herd. It just doesn&#x27;t make any sense, as their incentives are many times at the opposite spectrum than their customers.