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by jfengel 710 days ago
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.

5 comments

> 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.

AWS can do a lot of boring work in homogenizing their offering. Why does ALB connect to a Fargate instance, but API gateway does not.

Why can you use a public HTTP gateway, but not in a VPC?

All this stuff would make my life so much better than any form of genAI.

The problem is that these type of very much needed but boring new features don‘t grant you a promotion. But if you work on a GenAI product right now the odds are in your favour.
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.

AWS doesn't even have proper IPv6 support yet. If they can't find anything to improve in their conventional stack, it's only because they aren't looking.
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.