Dear AWS, please let me be a cloud engineer again

I’m an AWS Serverless Hero, principal engineer at an AWS centric logistics company, and I build and maintain https://aws-news.com. It’s fair to say that I am very interested in everything AWS does. But I fear AWS is no longer interested in what I do.

This post is about AWS’ obsession with Generative AI (GenAI) and how it pushes away everything that makes AWS, well, AWS. Of course it started with OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT, on November 30, 2022. Coincidentally, this date fell exactly in the middle of Re:Invent – Amazon’s yearly developer conference in Vegas. I was there and it was great. Werner Vogels had a keynote about event driven architectures and there were many sessions in areas like analytics, relational databases, devops, security, and very importantly, sustainability.

Fast forward one year, and the world couldn’t look more different. GenAI dominated Re:Invent 2023. Every topic was either about the infrastructure for GenAI, the integrations with GenAI, the data for GenAI, and how GenAI would make everything better, from customer interactions to content creation, from refactoring to operations. It was weird, but I dismissed it as peak hype cycle. And to be honest I too was pretty excited about all the opportunities GenAI would bring.

Then 2024 came around, and somehow AWS’ focus on GenAI took on hysterical proportions. It started with the global AWS summits, where at least 80% of the talks was about GenAI. Then there was AWS re:Inforce – the annual security conference – which was themed “Security in the era of generative AI”.

After re:Inforce came the flagship NYC summit. Corey Quinn wrote a great piece about the conference titled Amazon GenAI Services. A quote from his post:

However, the badge lanyards were GenAI branded, the keynote opening slide simply said “Generative AI,” and every single offering discussed during the ~98 minute keynote was centered around Generative AI. Nearly every expo hall booth was dripping with GenAI; Elastic even went so far as to rebrand itself as “The Search AI company.”

I wasn’t at the NYC summit so I can’t speak for the in-person experience. But I did monitor the releases they announced during the event. I summarized my thoughts in this tweet:

And this is the crux: AWS is now focused so strongly on GenAI that they seem not to care about anything else anymore – including everything that made developers love them and made them the leading cloud provider on almost every metric.

You need a business to benefit from GenAI

Now don’t get me wrong. I like GenAI. I use it extensively at work and for the AWS News Feed. I use ChatGPT to shape new ideas, Copilot to speed up development, and Claude to generate summaries. The point is that all these features add to an existing business. This business has customers, data, business rules, revenue, products, marketing, and all the other things that make a business tick. And most businesses had these things before 2022. GenAI allows us to add new features, and often faster than before. But GenAI has no value without an existing product to apply it to.

And this is where my work, my interests, and my passions come in. I like building products. I like designing scalable infrastructure. I like developing maintainable applications. And I love AWS for the tools they provide me to do this.

The implicit message

But AWS and I are growing apart. I feel the things I value are no longer the things they value. By only talking about GenAI, they implicitly tell me databases are not important. Scalable infrastructure is not important. Maintainable applications are not important. Only GenAI is.

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.

In summary, AWS’ implicit messaging tells developers they should no longer focus on core infrastructure, and spend their time on GenAI instead. I believe this is wrong. Because GenAI can only exist if there is a business to serve. Many, if not almost all of us developers got into AWS because we want to build and support these businesses. We’re not here to be gaslighted into the “GenAI will solve every problem” future. We know it won’t.

A better way

I’m not saying there is no value in GenAI. I’m not even saying AWS shouldn’t be building GenAI products. What I’m saying is that AWS is not a GenAI only company and shouldn’t pretend to be. $22.8 billion of AWS operating income in 2022 and $24.6 billion in 2023 is a hell of a user base to ignore. It is also a financial foundation that should allow them to focus on more than one thing.

I would love to see AWS un-ignore its roots. Show us you still value the businesses and products you supported in the past. Help developers build better applications by listening to them and solving their pain points. Educate them on the fundamentals of infrastructure: performance, reliability, cost efficiency, security, operational excellence, and sustainability.

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.