[HN Gopher] Dear AWS, please let me be a cloud engineer again
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Dear AWS, please let me be a cloud engineer again
Author : gregdoesit
Score : 94 points
Date : 2024-07-13 18:41 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lucvandonkersgoed.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lucvandonkersgoed.com)
| tootie wrote:
| I have to say I find their GenAI offerings muddled at best. I
| genuinely don't understand what Bedrock is trying to solve.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Recursive doom loop, we need to mirror everyone else's models
| at the same price and add Enterprise(tm) 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 wrote:
| Not 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 wrote:
| Hear 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 2004 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Yeah, def not arguing my paycheck is thin air -- its that
| there's a surface level-only respect for it. "Eyewash", in
| baseball parlance.
| asciii wrote:
| > I simply cannot imagine ex. 2000 Apple/Steve Jobs falling for
| this.
|
| No he would not entertain any of this nonsense. IIRC he had a
| hard time with the Siri demo too. It appears Apple is happy to
| take itself and shareholders on a side quest with all their
| cash...good time to be earning interest on it too.
| ko_pivot wrote:
| I 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.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| >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.
| layer8 wrote:
| If this is true, software engineering leadership is highly
| dysfunctional, and that should be an issue of major concern.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Welcome to some professional circle somewhere on the world at
| the 21th century.
| pram wrote:
| TBH 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Clouds/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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| FTA,
|
| > 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.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Serverless, architectless, and programmerless.
| layer8 wrote:
| AIless will be next.
| pylua wrote:
| "I'm sorry, I can't let you do that, Dave."
| 8organicbits wrote:
| > 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.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| > Can you point to any actual AI product in this space that
| functions?
|
| Today? No. But I think we will get here sooner than
| automating on any other type of engineering role.
| cleandreams wrote:
| Sure. It's coming with GPT-5.
| fragmede wrote:
| > embarrassingly wrong, unsafe, or otherwise unusable.
|
| You might know the difference as an SME, but if you're not,
| and it passes terraform apply, it's getting used.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| This mentality is why I'm confident that I'll have a job in
| both software development and security.
| lolinder wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| While 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.
| throwaway8481 wrote:
| > Model outputs are untrusted input.
|
| I think the problem is they're trying to introduce nuance and a
| narrow path to allow this. They want an acceptable level of
| risk to using untrusted model output for the
| efficiency/productivity gains it will bring, notwithstanding
| hallucinations.
|
| Generative AI would not have flown in the security theater of
| Yesteryear, but CTOs see productivity multipliers.
| usea wrote:
| > CTOs see productivity multipliers
|
| The CTOs are hallucinating as much as the LLMs are.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The GP didn't state the multiplier's value. Those things
| absolutely are productivity multipliers...
| lolinder wrote:
| Right, but that's not a new problem either. We want to allow
| people to send emails with some acceptably-low level of risk
| that spam will get through. We want an acceptably-low risk
| that our image upload feature won't be hosting CSAM. And we
| want it while still getting the benefits of allowing our real
| customers to pay us for the services we offer. Businesses
| have been figuring out the balance of risk:reward for as long
| as infosec has been a concept.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| As a person replying to your comment in the era of generative
| AI, I'm inclined to agree the hype is a bit much, _even_
| considering how impressive the technology can (sometimes) be.
|
| Another big area of hype is "prompt engineering." That one
| seems to have calmed down slightly, but for a while, there were
| _large_ swaths of the Internet who were amazed that the set
| intersection of "talk like a decent human being" and "be
| precise in your communication" could generally lead to good
| results.
|
| In many ways, "AI" right now is magic marketing sprinkles that
| you can put on anything to make it more delicious. (Or, if
| you're inside a big company, it's magic prioritization
| sprinkles.)
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Maybe the prompt engineering should have caught on more. I'm
| convinced that the large swaths of people commenting here and
| elsewhere "I don't get AI, it's just a parrot and it's always
| wrong and hallucinates, it's not useful" just don't
| understand that the prompt matters and the idea isn't to one
| shot everything. It writes good code for me every day, so I
| can only assume they're asking "Write me an OS from scratch"
| and then throwing their hands up when it obviously fails.
| lolinder wrote:
| I think that calling it "prompt engineering" is what made
| it fail to catch on. We didn't call it "Google engineering"
| back in the day when you could actually craft a Google
| search to turn up useful results, we called it "Google-fu"
| [0].
|
| "Google-fu" sounds like a fun skill to learn and acquire,
| where "prompt engineering" sounds either like something
| well out of reach or like pretentious nonsense depending on
| the audience.
|
| [0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/google-fu/
| refulgentis wrote:
| Been quietly wondering something similar to you for a year:
| I've ended up 95% confident that phenomena is due to people
| evaluating it in terms of "does it _replace_ me? "
|
| Cosign prompt engineering. Startup is tl;dr "what if i made
| a on-every-platform app that can sync and let you choose
| whatever ai provider, and you pay at cost. and then give
| you a simple UI for piecing together steps like dialogue /
| ai chat / search / retrieve / use files"
|
| Seems to me the bigs are completely off the mark, lets cede
| the idea there's an omniscient AI available now. Cool. It
| still has no idea how you work.
|
| you could see the hitchhiker's guide the galaxy "42" thing
| as a deep parody of this category error
| fragmede wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Businesses don't always act like perfectly rational actors,
| bubbles are a thing.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| You 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 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| Interesting. 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 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| when 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 wrote:
| An "AWS Serverless Hero" is upset AWS are acting vain around
| their AI posturing.
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| touche
| cperciva wrote:
| AWS 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 wrote:
| To 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 wrote:
| How 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 wrote:
| Lambda is servers like kubernetes is servers
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| Having 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.
| whirlwin wrote:
| Good 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.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| I'm just going to say it: Gen AI is a complete and total
| nothingburger.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Current 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 wrote:
| AWS 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 wrote:
| AWS 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 wrote:
| it'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 wrote:
| This 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.
| Androider wrote:
| AWS 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.
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