Cronos Echo, Cloud Computing Platforms Devour Their Parents | ✉️ #17

Graphic for "MKDEV DISPATCH #17" with a title "CLOUD COMPUTING PLATFORMS DEVOUR THEIR PARENTS," featuring an illustrated portrait of a man with glasses and an abstract design background. Graphic for "MKDEV DISPATCH #17" with a title "CLOUD COMPUTING PLATFORMS DEVOUR THEIR PARENTS," featuring an illustrated portrait of a man with glasses and an abstract design background.

Hey! 👋

There are 3 major companies in the world that offer cloud services right now. Google (which is an advertising company), Amazon (a company that, as we all know, is dedicated to online product sales), and Microsoft (which used to be an operating system and now sells computers, looks for job offers for you, is a git repository, a video game console, video game studios, and a thousand more things).

But these 3 major companies have a trend that is becoming more and more entrenched with Google's latest first quarter 2023 results. These 3 companies are increasingly dependent on their Cloud products.

To give you an idea, Microsoft in the last quarter had $52B in revenue, of which the largest portion is Azure or Intelligent Cloud, as they call it, so we never forget about AI, which was $22B, a 16% growth from last year with a 43% operating margin, giving us $9.5B in operating margin or 50% of the total. It should be understood that within Intelligent Cloud we have other services, such as Microsoft support, and it is difficult to pull out the real number, but we are talking about 50% of the entire net profit of the company, after taxes, thanks to Azure or Intelligent cloud.

Another wonderful case is Google. The only thing here is that things move more slowly. But for the first time since GCP hit the market, it can be said that it has generated profits. This quarter, revenues reached $7.5B, a 28% growth over last year, and it made $191 million. The only trick here is that Google Workspaces is also counted and there are hardly any companies that do not pay their $ to Google for having an email.

And finally, we have the monster called Amazon. In this case, we are talking about a company that, in the last quarter, invoiced $127B, of which $21B was from AWS, and once again it has shown that the company runs at a loss without AWS, and has again demonstrated that after invoicing a whopping $125B, only one department has made profits, and this is AWS.

Soon we may see the same thing in Oracle or Deutsche Telekom, but we have to give it time, but in any case, we are seeing how large advertising companies, online product sales or operating systems are becoming day by day companies dedicated to the Cloud.

It seems that this is now unstoppable.


What We've Shared


What We've Discovered

  • AI as a Code: An open source tool to generate infrastructure code with the help of OpenAI. We personally have hard time getting from GPT-4 a good Terraform code, but it is useful to get some basic templates written.

  • Ditch the Template: Incident Write-ups They Want to Read: Writing is one of the core and most important parts of a job. This post explores how to make incident reports useful and readable, and not just a checkbox to tick for compliance.

  • AWS Amplify Is A Grift: A valid critiscm of AWS Amplify and how it lets you down at the persistence layer and violates AWS’s own best practices for DynamoDB usage.

  • DevOps uses Capability not Maturity: We’ve always been sceptical about maturity models for DevOps as a way too rigid and discouraging way to measure progress in this area within a company. This post offers an alternative that is way more flexible, iterative and infinite.

  • Read Every Single Error: Refreshing view on how to deal with errors. Key here is this quote: "Collecting fancy metrics does not matter if your users are not happy." - SLOs, Error Budgets etc are okay, but you need to remember that behind every error occurance there is an unhappy user.


A random reminder

This June you can meet us in Amsterdam at Devopsdays!


The 18th mkdev dispatch will arrive on Friday, May 12th. See you next time!