Hater Season: Corey Quinn

**Ed Zitron** (0:04)
Hello and welcome to Better Offline, I am of course your host Ed Zitron. Now, we're in hater season. Hater season is when I bring people on and allow them to get rude. Because you know, this podcast is usually so reserved and nice in the way we refer to people, especially tech executives, which we've never referred to as fuckwits or morons or dumbasses or shitheads or shitheals or arse wipes or fucknots or knobends. We've never done any of that ever. Nevertheless, joining me today is Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, Corey Quinn. Corey, how are you doing?

**Corey Quinn** (0:48)
I am delighted to be here, because normally in all the other places I find myself, I have to be so reserved.

**Ed Zitron** (0:54)
You have to pull your punches. Corey, today's hater season, tell me about your feelings on Amazon Web Services.

**Corey Quinn** (1:03)
Oh, dear Lord. It's like, it's weird. I don't actually hate Amazon. People think I do because of the things I say and the things that I do. But if I hated them this month, but 10 years in, I write a newsletter about it. If I actually hate the company and want nothing but ill things to happen to them, first off, that's a pathology and I need a restraining order. And secondly, it always bugs me when people think that I have an axe to grind against the company because 10 years in, are you seriously suggesting this is the best I would be able to do if I actually wanted to hit them where it hurts? Come on. But yeah, they've been annoying the piss out of me lately.

**Ed Zitron** (1:39)
So AWS is weird because, and maybe you can explain this to me, over my entire tech career, I've heard this constant story that your AWS bill just, it just goes up, it just arbitrarily increases. It's not really clear whether they're doing price increases, though I know those exist too.

**Corey Quinn** (1:56)
Rarely, but occasionally, increasingly these days, yes.

**Ed Zitron** (2:00)
But why, what is it that makes the bill go up? Why, and why does this happen so often?

**Corey Quinn** (2:05)
I used to think it was a conspiracy and then I realized Amazon is in no way, shape or form organizationally competent enough to pull something like that off. It is the nature of charging per usage and honestly, assholes, where, okay, we're going to launch a service and we're going to charge you for every gigabyte you put in it. That's all we're going to do. Great. Straightforward. Humans can rationalize around that. Great.

**Ed Zitron** (2:26)
Easy peasy.

**Corey Quinn** (2:27)
They did that when they first launched S3 in beta back in 2005

**Ed Zitron** (2:31)
S3 is storage, right?

**Corey Quinn** (2:32)
It's a big object store. Picture it as an infinite size disk and you're pretty close. But originally, they only charged for the data you stored there. Great. So people stored a bunch of objects that were zero bite in size.
So they just used the names of those objects and the ability to query whether that object existed or not and what its name was as a free database. This at the time also, according to legend, didn't just, it wasn't just about taking free services. It was also just crippling the performance of S3 at the time. So what they did is they started also charging every request you make would charge a small fee. I think it's something like a penny per thousand requests if memory serves. Don't quote me on that. I look it up when it matters. And that solves that problem. But then you have things like that that are patched on and tied to things and tied to things and tied to more things. And in any complex organization, what happens is, is now suddenly you have this morass of a hundred million dollars a year in spent. Great. What's in there that's costing all the money? Well, everything. But if you look at anything individual and you don't think it's being used, okay, am I going to turn it off? If I'm right, it's going to save me a bit of money. If I'm wrong, it's going to take down production and now I have a serious problem trying to serve my customers. So the safe bias is don't turn things off. Also, you're an engineer, hypothetically. I realize that can be an insult to your part of the world, but roll with it for a moment. Exactly. You're an engineer. You want something to spin up and no one is letting you spin it up. You will take up residents annoying the hell out of them every 10 minutes until you get the access that you need. Right. You do your job. Things are done. Two things now work against you. One, you had to ask and beg and plead them to spin that up. You want to hang on to it in case you need it again, because you don't want to go through that. But also-