What hath AWS wrought?

thoughts on a very, very strange re:Invent

You know what struck me as the strangest thing about the 2024 edition of AWS re:Invent?

It wasn’t the giant video boards on the Las Vegas Strip that interspersed ads for topless revues with ads for PagerDuty and Cribl, although that was unintentionally very funny.

It was the fact that, as far as I can tell, AWS didn’t launch a single new top-level service.

I could be missing something here, but check out the top announcements for yourself. The new service I think people are most excited about, DSQL, launched under the Aurora branding. Amazon Nova is a class of foundation models on Bedrock. Other than that: it’s a lot of new AI capabilities for Q and Sagemaker, some fun new database-y enhancements for S3, etc. I don’t have to learn a single new top-level service name in order to understand why I should care about what happened at re:Invent this year.

This, to put it mildly, has not always been the case.

Let me show you something.

2014 was the first year I really paid attention to re:Invent. That was the year my CEO at the time, Charles Phillips of Infor, claimed onstage at an AWS event that “friends don’t let friends build data centers.”

It was also the year in which these were the big keynote announcements:

• Aurora. Technically released under the RDS brand. Still a stone-cold, first-ballot-hall-of-fame AWS service.

• KMS. Essential, bread-and butter AWS service.

• Config and Service Catalog. Good-enough admin services, they continue to be used and abused today.

• CodeDeploy/CodePipeline/CodeCommit. People have given them lots of chances over the years. CodeCommit has sadly been deprecated, the other two live on. Everybody has used them at one point or another, even if they will never be best-in-class devtools. (Foreshadowing!)

• ECS. Easy hall-of-famer, even if EKS has more momentum these days.

• Lambda. Inner-circle hall-of-famer, perhaps the most innovative cloud service of all time.

I realize we have ten years of hindsight to look back on, but that is a killer set of releases, right? Aurora, ECS, Lambda, and KMS all in the same week? No wonder we all used to feel like re:Invent rewrote the software development rulebook every year.

And no wonder AWS eventually took exactly the wrong message from those glory years, which was that if you just release ENOUGH STUFF, surely some of it will be great.

Here, less gloriously, is a sampling of new top-level services announced at re:Invent between 2020 and 2022: Proton, CloudShell, HealthLake, DevOps Guru, Lookout for Equipment/Vision/Metrics, Panorama, Monitron, Security Lake, Wickr, SimSpace Weaver, App Composer, CodeCatalyst, and Omics.

As David S Pumpkins says, it’s 100 floors of frights, they’re not all gonna be winners.

But. I mean. Here we have a collection of things that have already been deprecated (Lookout), devtools that sank without a trace (DevOps Guru, Proton, App Composer, CodeCatalyst), and business apps targeted to industry verticals so niche that I have no good intuition for whether they’ve succeeded or not. (I suspect not.)

I’m convinced that this profusion of lame service announcements contributed to the noticeable stagnation of the AWS community in recent years. How do you expect to get developers excited about AWS when all the marketing dollars are going into hyping things nobody cares about?

OK, but now look at 2023. That was the AI year, so everything was Q, Bedrock, Bedrock, Q, more Bedrock, etc. But other than that, the only new top-level service announcement I could find was B2B Data Interchange. Something was changing at AWS.

And this year: nothing. OK, not nothing. A lot of cool things. S3 Bucket Tables are fascinating. I think in 10 years we’ll look back at DSQL as a Hall-of-Fame service. But isn’t it different—and kind of refreshing—to feel like AWS is telling us “We do infrastructure primitives better than anyone, so sit back and let us delight you with our latest improvements to the primitives you already know and love?”

I’ve loudly complained about the haphazard way AWS is deprecating failed services from their David S Pumpkins years. But I walked away from this year’s re:Invent more encouraged by the overall product direction there than I have been since the pandemic. Sure, we’re all going to have to sit through plenty of garbage AI announcements for the next few years. I get it, that’s priced in. But instead of frightening us with 100 floors of duds, it really does seem like AWS is making some attempt to double down on making their good stuff better.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this year’s expo hall was bigger and more vibrant than I’ve ever seen it. As AWS cedes more of its dev experience story to vendors, more and more developers can use and enjoy AWS’s primitives without being Stockholm-Syndromed into pretending that Elastic CodeBlibbinator is the app development tool of the future. The whole ecosystem wins.

And I hope that we’ll soon see the vibrance of AWS’s developer community come back as well.

Good sponsored things

First, a shoutout to Freeman & Forrest client incident.io for sponsoring this issue. They are very, very good at incident management, which is a different thing than being good at sending on-call pages. But they’re good at that too. I highly recommend booking a demo with them to see for yourself.

And one last time in 2024, I commend to you the educational stylings of Pluralsight, free to you for 30 days.

Just for fun

Oh boy, Reddit HATED this one.