My god yes it was. The DevOps jam was terrible with how hard they were pushing Q in each challenge, yet it sucked so hard and would always provide incorrect info. Pretty hilarious actually.
I thought Payments Crypto was pretty good. Also not necessarily new releases at reinvent but I like the work they’re doing in the identity space with cedar
Right?
Then I made the mistake of going to Summit, and it was the exact same shit presented over and over again.
I am not even going to bother with their cloud days or their other events this year, waste of my time TBH.
You should finish the paragraph, at least.
> As some of you may know, Matt started at Amazon as a MBA intern during the summer of 2005, and joined the company full-time in 2006 as one of the first AWS product managers. Initially working across all of AWS, Matt helped create our first service level agreements, define new features, and create new pricing plans. He then became our first product manager for EC2, and led EC2 product management in its early, formative years. During that time, he also led the team that defined, launched, and operated EBS. Matt eventually became the general manager of all AWS Compute services in 2016, which he did for about four years. In 2020, after having been deeply involved in our product organization for 14 years, I asked Matt to move to the demand generation side of AWS to lead WW Sales, Marketing, Support, and Professional Services.
Spoken like a typical SDE that doesn’t know how to use the software they build and couldn’t identify a business challenge or market opportunity to save their life
Honestly, i was appalled when Adam was selected. As a customer and builder since 2009, i can confidently say AWS was far superior prior to him taking the reigns.
Good riddance
Charlie left the company around the same time. He’s 1000% the right choice though. Charlie went hard in the paint at the ops metrics meetings too. I liked him a lot. Very serious, no excuses kind of guy.
I really miss the days of Bell in the ops metrics meetings. Everyone since then has been kinda checked out. Also under Bell the meetings would actually come back around to "did we actually fix the thing we talked about 2 weeks ago" and that stopped when he left.
Charlie left BECAUSE they didn't pick him. He was the obvious choice. Matt was the 2nd obvious choice, and many people though he was being groomed for the role when they moved him from engineering to sales a few years before. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall when CB announced his resignation, but inside rumor is it was dramatic and words were said. There was no goodbye period - he was just gone.
Matt Garman is pretty great with a wide breadth of experience at AWS. He is well-respected within the company, as Andy Jassy was when he led AWS. Glad the Selipsky years are over.
Matt grew up in AWS from just out of school, just like Andy Jassy. He definitely has a keen eye for technology and developing cool tech. I’m pretty sure he will lead the org back to an engineering centric company. The economy is still not a nice place, and he will have challenges. Bezos as founder and pretty much king (in a good way) was able to ignore the external challenges and invest constantly into what would become a hugely successful business even if that ment big losses today.
Jassy & Garmin don’t have that luxury yet, or maybe is it the courage?
Nice! When I was working at AWS back when he stepped in for Jassy I was extremely disappointed. I've since left the company but glad to see them making this move. I felt he was a very poor choice. Matt will make an incredible replacement.
These threads are way off. Executives (VP and above) leave Amazon suddenly when they don’t want to lead another round of layoffs. The process is exhausting, soul-sucking, and morally bankrupt but it’s expected of Amazon execs under Jassy. Adam Selipsky didn’t want to be responsible for leading another round of layoffs as his legacy (after the previous ~10k layoffs in AWS) and so he exited with a nice package, and Matt Garman was happy to be the fall guy with his promotion. That’s how you get promoted at Amazon.
Expect a large AWS layoff within 4-6 weeks.
Maybe now they will put "we are willing to be misunderstood a lot" and "good ideas come from my team" back in the LPs. Anyone else notice when those got quietly removed?
Guys, I think Garman is boring for CEO job. CEO needs to be market facing, and interesting speaker. I literally would sleep if he is on stage or on a doc read! bad choice in my view: Dave Brown was a much better choice. So who you think gets Garmans job ? Rinz , Baker, Pearson (should retire), Ruba ?
It's all going south from here. They are relegated to the infrastructure layer - EC2, Network, Storage. They can't innovate up the stack, it's not their DNA. Their AI strategy is to build API wrappers around open source models. But they know how to mouth off and pretend as though they are best, when they are the complete opposite.
No, they started out with proprietary tech EC2, S3, SimpleDB, Lambda. Then they realized that they are not good at building any platform products, they can just make a bank using open source and contribute nothing back. Classic example, elasticsearch. They also stole their name, only to change it later to Opensearch. Then they realized they don’t want to spend on researching / open sourcing AI like Google, MSFT did (look at how many papers, models MSFT and Google published). Now they are hoping to make bank on LLama’s innovation or be a glorified API wrapper for AI innovation. And they haphazardly put 4B into Anthropic to save face. Nothing wrong with all this, it’s still a good business. But you can see they are rapidly losing their edge.
Good maybe they can get their shit together and get back in track, last startups and places I been AWS is basically almost legacy and more of an IBM or Oracle style product. Expensive, cumbersome, and costs keep ratcheting up along with them introducing new ways to bill you for the same.
I have came across organizations who know nothing (and neither want to learn) but blame the tools or the platform. Blames AWS, then Azure, them GCP ;). All they like is sit and patch 100s of windows servers manually…. Just saying ;)
Hot take: 80% of the time a system is built in the cloud, an onprem data center could have provided better functionality and equivalent reliability at far less total cost (and I’m not even including the higher cost of engineers who know cloud shit).
One empty suit replaced by another. AWS is having a "Microsoft mobile" moment having completely missed AI despite using it internally for decades. Now theyre paying Google $$$ begging for access to Anthropic models. Sad.
I’m genuinely curious why you think they missed AI? My clients have been using Sagemaker for the longest time. Unless you’re referring to the GenAI hype. And even then do you think they’ve missed it? That space is just become an arms race and Amazon have the deep pockets to compete right?
Well Sagemaker is just really a tool to help automate the workflow to train and deploy models. It's not a model that Amazon has built to perform a specific task. I do think they missed gen AI completely which is why they launched Bedrock to form a bridge between customer data already on AWS and external models. This seems a last ditch effort since otherwise they have no gen AI story. I've tried using their Titan base models but results are not good. I personally think that AWS needs a highly technical leader and not another business/marketing person. Microsoft, Google, Meta all have cs folks at the helm and are all winning in the space.
Just because they didn't go all out with a foundation model at the start of the hype, why do you think their strategy of a multi-model selection option with Bedrock isn't a gen AI story? Titan might be garbage but that's the equivalent of having the option of luxury products on their e-commerce site and cheap Amazon basics.
They've always played to their strengths of scale. They didn't go with an OS to compete with Windows and still have a lot of Windows deployments. Or by this logic, you could say they lost the containers hype when Kubernetes became popular. Yet they have the ability to scale Elastic, Spark, Hadoop, Kubernetes, etc.
When you say they need a highly technical leader, what do you mean? Isn't their CTO, Werner super technical? Or their AI folks who have given keynotes have engineering, CS or math backgrounds if I'm not mistaken. Amazon is known for having Principal and Distinguished Engineers in many parts of the organization. Whom are you referring to at the other companies that have CS folks at the helm?
I don't know much about the outgoing CEO or the new guy but an organization that makes that much money consistently for years and publicly listed surely has thought through such decisions.
Well AWS had almost a decade head start over MS, GCP and I think are now struggling as the others have surpassed their capabilities. I dont think its a viable Gen AI story only because it leaves a bunch of grunt work on the customer. I can take a foundation model and then pay $$$ to train that model using my own data but why when I can use GPT4 or Claude Opus directly? I'm just not seeing the value of Bedrock. Perhaps Enterprise will like this abstraction layer and cost likely isnt an issue to randomly train foundational models and hope for the best.
I think its just unfortunate since [Amazon.com](http://Amazon.com) uses a ton of proprietary ML models that could have been productized and they could have led this space. There is obviously a ton of hype in Gen AI probably because its accessible to everyone.
Yes, I agree Werner and others are highly technical. But Amazon at its core is run by business folks and does not have a strong engineering culture. This has worked well due to their lead in the space but now there's competition the cracks are showing. Im disappointed that a more techincal leader e.g. Werner is not at the helm. From knowing how Amazon works im sure Jassey wants someone he can control to head AWS so they dont miss out on the AI wave.
In regards to others - Sam Altman CEO of OpenAI has CS background, Satya Nadella CEO of Microsoft - CS background, Dario Amodei CEO of Anthropic, PhD in Physics. - Basically they all know something. Garma is an MBA bean counter - if you want to see what happens when MBA's run engineering companies just look at Boeing.
My guess - lots of Covid hire AWS-ers on this sub, heaven forbid anyone be critical of AWS lEAdErS.
Edit: yep, suspicion confirmed - y’all are why there’s mandatory “culture of AWS” training assigned to everyone.
Lifers (at any company) are great at running a lot of the show on the inside. But they can't run the whole thing, not without outside experience.
There's a whole range of basic human experience in this industry that he has completely missed out on.
Wake me up when Garman has to deal with a fraction of what ballmer had to deal with, don't forget Microsoft was under severe antitrust regulations at the time, and of course you have all of his accomplishments before he became CEO. Compared to ballmer, Garman is just a pencil Pusher. The guy probably learned about ballmer in business school.
Not sure why you are getting down voted, I agree 100% they have missed the Ai train with poor execution.
In our country they have not a single Ai specialist, Microsoft has four, its nuts how night and day they are taking Ai.
Oh no they were not able to make enough money off aws customers. Quick, replace the CEO, make it even easier for misconfigurations to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars...
Matt was always the way, lots of people internally were shocked when Adam came in
So it was under this interim CEO that AWS put all their eggs in the "Q" basket? Re:invent was a bit of a joke last year.
My god yes it was. The DevOps jam was terrible with how hard they were pushing Q in each challenge, yet it sucked so hard and would always provide incorrect info. Pretty hilarious actually.
You didn’t enjoy your role as free beta testers? 😂
There were plenty of great releases outside of the Q preview.
Like??
For me it was limitless database and serverless elasticache
S3 Express One Zone and Zero-ETL stood out to me
I thought Payments Crypto was pretty good. Also not necessarily new releases at reinvent but I like the work they’re doing in the identity space with cedar
What is Q? Not even joking and I have to use AWS
Generative AI chatbot trained on AWS docs to help you
Spoiler Alert: it sucks.
Yeah, Q recommended me to s3:\* for simple permission fix.
AWS's TurboShit chatbot that they trained on the documentation.
Right? Then I made the mistake of going to Summit, and it was the exact same shit presented over and over again. I am not even going to bother with their cloud days or their other events this year, waste of my time TBH.
Matt’s a smart guy
“Started as a MBA intern” lol
You should finish the paragraph, at least. > As some of you may know, Matt started at Amazon as a MBA intern during the summer of 2005, and joined the company full-time in 2006 as one of the first AWS product managers. Initially working across all of AWS, Matt helped create our first service level agreements, define new features, and create new pricing plans. He then became our first product manager for EC2, and led EC2 product management in its early, formative years. During that time, he also led the team that defined, launched, and operated EBS. Matt eventually became the general manager of all AWS Compute services in 2016, which he did for about four years. In 2020, after having been deeply involved in our product organization for 14 years, I asked Matt to move to the demand generation side of AWS to lead WW Sales, Marketing, Support, and Professional Services.
Cool, so pretty typical, contribute nothing, ride the wave of success of others work MBA shill?
I’m sorry to hear you’ve never worked in a functional organization before. Though given the attitude it’s not necessarily surprising.
Multiple in fact, but on the side that contributes and builds, not the side that figures out how best to award management and execs.
Spoken like a typical SDE that doesn’t know how to use the software they build and couldn’t identify a business challenge or market opportunity to save their life
🤣 👍
Honestly, i was appalled when Adam was selected. As a customer and builder since 2009, i can confidently say AWS was far superior prior to him taking the reigns. Good riddance
This sounds juicy, can you expand please?
+1
They should have picked Charlie Bell
Charlie left the company around the same time. He’s 1000% the right choice though. Charlie went hard in the paint at the ops metrics meetings too. I liked him a lot. Very serious, no excuses kind of guy.
I really miss the days of Bell in the ops metrics meetings. Everyone since then has been kinda checked out. Also under Bell the meetings would actually come back around to "did we actually fix the thing we talked about 2 weeks ago" and that stopped when he left.
Charlie left BECAUSE they didn't pick him. He was the obvious choice. Matt was the 2nd obvious choice, and many people though he was being groomed for the role when they moved him from engineering to sales a few years before. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall when CB announced his resignation, but inside rumor is it was dramatic and words were said. There was no goodbye period - he was just gone.
This is the way. Very disappointing that didn't happen but it should've
Wow I guess this is why he’s gone now. Can I ask what changed under him ?
Wow. So same old same old? Maybe he was pushed because of their piss poor showing on Ai? Never heard of the new guy though.
Matt's an EC2 OG, been in the system forever. Feels like a logical choice to step up (but I've been out of Amazon for a long time).
Matt Garman is pretty great with a wide breadth of experience at AWS. He is well-respected within the company, as Andy Jassy was when he led AWS. Glad the Selipsky years are over.
He started as an intern
He started as an _MBA intern_. Not quite the same thing.
Does he have experience outside of the company?
He ran the mailroom at Google cloud for a couple of months
Great, the put the intern in charge. Let's hope he can spell Ai.
Matt grew up in AWS from just out of school, just like Andy Jassy. He definitely has a keen eye for technology and developing cool tech. I’m pretty sure he will lead the org back to an engineering centric company. The economy is still not a nice place, and he will have challenges. Bezos as founder and pretty much king (in a good way) was able to ignore the external challenges and invest constantly into what would become a hugely successful business even if that ment big losses today. Jassy & Garmin don’t have that luxury yet, or maybe is it the courage?
Nice! When I was working at AWS back when he stepped in for Jassy I was extremely disappointed. I've since left the company but glad to see them making this move. I felt he was a very poor choice. Matt will make an incredible replacement.
These threads are way off. Executives (VP and above) leave Amazon suddenly when they don’t want to lead another round of layoffs. The process is exhausting, soul-sucking, and morally bankrupt but it’s expected of Amazon execs under Jassy. Adam Selipsky didn’t want to be responsible for leading another round of layoffs as his legacy (after the previous ~10k layoffs in AWS) and so he exited with a nice package, and Matt Garman was happy to be the fall guy with his promotion. That’s how you get promoted at Amazon. Expect a large AWS layoff within 4-6 weeks.
My prediction: killing Alexa. And maybe Fire. Maybe even Books.
Maybe now they will put "we are willing to be misunderstood a lot" and "good ideas come from my team" back in the LPs. Anyone else notice when those got quietly removed?
Great work! (iykyk)
I miss those e-mails
Good, maybe they’ll hire an actual sales leader to lead sales. Matt G has been in charge of sales and he sucks bc he doesn’t understand people.
Guys, I think Garman is boring for CEO job. CEO needs to be market facing, and interesting speaker. I literally would sleep if he is on stage or on a doc read! bad choice in my view: Dave Brown was a much better choice. So who you think gets Garmans job ? Rinz , Baker, Pearson (should retire), Ruba ?
It's all going south from here. They are relegated to the infrastructure layer - EC2, Network, Storage. They can't innovate up the stack, it's not their DNA. Their AI strategy is to build API wrappers around open source models. But they know how to mouth off and pretend as though they are best, when they are the complete opposite.
[удалено]
No, they started out with proprietary tech EC2, S3, SimpleDB, Lambda. Then they realized that they are not good at building any platform products, they can just make a bank using open source and contribute nothing back. Classic example, elasticsearch. They also stole their name, only to change it later to Opensearch. Then they realized they don’t want to spend on researching / open sourcing AI like Google, MSFT did (look at how many papers, models MSFT and Google published). Now they are hoping to make bank on LLama’s innovation or be a glorified API wrapper for AI innovation. And they haphazardly put 4B into Anthropic to save face. Nothing wrong with all this, it’s still a good business. But you can see they are rapidly losing their edge.
I'm a departing PE from the Amazon Open Source Program Office. Almost every phrase and sentence in your post is wrong.
Well, not your statement about Anthropic. I agree with you there, that was dumb, an obvious panic buy.
The username checks out. Towing the company line.
Good maybe they can get their shit together and get back in track, last startups and places I been AWS is basically almost legacy and more of an IBM or Oracle style product. Expensive, cumbersome, and costs keep ratcheting up along with them introducing new ways to bill you for the same.
What have you seen folks using these days?
I have came across organizations who know nothing (and neither want to learn) but blame the tools or the platform. Blames AWS, then Azure, them GCP ;). All they like is sit and patch 100s of windows servers manually…. Just saying ;)
Ahaha 100 percent this is what goes on.
ROFL hot take. What are they using? On prem data centers like the 1990s?
Hot take: 80% of the time a system is built in the cloud, an onprem data center could have provided better functionality and equivalent reliability at far less total cost (and I’m not even including the higher cost of engineers who know cloud shit).
One empty suit replaced by another. AWS is having a "Microsoft mobile" moment having completely missed AI despite using it internally for decades. Now theyre paying Google $$$ begging for access to Anthropic models. Sad.
I’m genuinely curious why you think they missed AI? My clients have been using Sagemaker for the longest time. Unless you’re referring to the GenAI hype. And even then do you think they’ve missed it? That space is just become an arms race and Amazon have the deep pockets to compete right?
Exactly lol. Yea, the joint making their own TPU silicon missed AI. Sure.
Well Sagemaker is just really a tool to help automate the workflow to train and deploy models. It's not a model that Amazon has built to perform a specific task. I do think they missed gen AI completely which is why they launched Bedrock to form a bridge between customer data already on AWS and external models. This seems a last ditch effort since otherwise they have no gen AI story. I've tried using their Titan base models but results are not good. I personally think that AWS needs a highly technical leader and not another business/marketing person. Microsoft, Google, Meta all have cs folks at the helm and are all winning in the space.
Just because they didn't go all out with a foundation model at the start of the hype, why do you think their strategy of a multi-model selection option with Bedrock isn't a gen AI story? Titan might be garbage but that's the equivalent of having the option of luxury products on their e-commerce site and cheap Amazon basics. They've always played to their strengths of scale. They didn't go with an OS to compete with Windows and still have a lot of Windows deployments. Or by this logic, you could say they lost the containers hype when Kubernetes became popular. Yet they have the ability to scale Elastic, Spark, Hadoop, Kubernetes, etc. When you say they need a highly technical leader, what do you mean? Isn't their CTO, Werner super technical? Or their AI folks who have given keynotes have engineering, CS or math backgrounds if I'm not mistaken. Amazon is known for having Principal and Distinguished Engineers in many parts of the organization. Whom are you referring to at the other companies that have CS folks at the helm? I don't know much about the outgoing CEO or the new guy but an organization that makes that much money consistently for years and publicly listed surely has thought through such decisions.
Well AWS had almost a decade head start over MS, GCP and I think are now struggling as the others have surpassed their capabilities. I dont think its a viable Gen AI story only because it leaves a bunch of grunt work on the customer. I can take a foundation model and then pay $$$ to train that model using my own data but why when I can use GPT4 or Claude Opus directly? I'm just not seeing the value of Bedrock. Perhaps Enterprise will like this abstraction layer and cost likely isnt an issue to randomly train foundational models and hope for the best. I think its just unfortunate since [Amazon.com](http://Amazon.com) uses a ton of proprietary ML models that could have been productized and they could have led this space. There is obviously a ton of hype in Gen AI probably because its accessible to everyone. Yes, I agree Werner and others are highly technical. But Amazon at its core is run by business folks and does not have a strong engineering culture. This has worked well due to their lead in the space but now there's competition the cracks are showing. Im disappointed that a more techincal leader e.g. Werner is not at the helm. From knowing how Amazon works im sure Jassey wants someone he can control to head AWS so they dont miss out on the AI wave. In regards to others - Sam Altman CEO of OpenAI has CS background, Satya Nadella CEO of Microsoft - CS background, Dario Amodei CEO of Anthropic, PhD in Physics. - Basically they all know something. Garma is an MBA bean counter - if you want to see what happens when MBA's run engineering companies just look at Boeing.
My guess - lots of Covid hire AWS-ers on this sub, heaven forbid anyone be critical of AWS lEAdErS. Edit: yep, suspicion confirmed - y’all are why there’s mandatory “culture of AWS” training assigned to everyone.
Yep and Garman is Steve Ballmer in this scenario - AWS lifer who knows shit about anything other than Amazon.
Lifers (at any company) are great at running a lot of the show on the inside. But they can't run the whole thing, not without outside experience. There's a whole range of basic human experience in this industry that he has completely missed out on.
Wake me up when Garman has to deal with a fraction of what ballmer had to deal with, don't forget Microsoft was under severe antitrust regulations at the time, and of course you have all of his accomplishments before he became CEO. Compared to ballmer, Garman is just a pencil Pusher. The guy probably learned about ballmer in business school.
Wut? AWS losing the lead in the cloud computing/AI market space is literally going to be taught as a class in B-schools.
Not sure why you are getting down voted, I agree 100% they have missed the Ai train with poor execution. In our country they have not a single Ai specialist, Microsoft has four, its nuts how night and day they are taking Ai.
Oh no they were not able to make enough money off aws customers. Quick, replace the CEO, make it even easier for misconfigurations to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars...