LightNews — News, ranked by scholars

Corey Quinn

@quinnypig.com

A single cloud deal that represents a full third of AWS’s revenue? I’m skeptical.

Techmeme @techmeme.com · Jun 30

SEC filing: Oracle signed multiple large cloud agreements, including one that is expected to contribute $30B+ in annual revenue starting in FY28; ORCL jumps 5%+ (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

June 30, 2025 at 4:51 PM

Corey Quinn

@quinnypig.com

This is basically how AWS’s Trusted Advisor service works: triple counting savings.

shauna @goldengateblond.bsky.social · Feb 19

helluva thread from the hellsite about the comically bad “savings” doge claims to have found (sorry for the weirdly sized screenshots, I had to squeeze everything into only 4 of them)

from @electricfutures

After several delays, @DOGE has finally posted its purported savings. Why did it take so long to create a simple webpage with a
1000-row table? Who knows! Let's dig in.
Headline number: $55B saved. They list the savings per nixed contract. This should be easy to verify then.

It's Monday. @DOGE is the laziest, most overpaid bunch of incompetent, unelected bureaucrats we've ever seen.

The first thing I did is add up the "saved" column for all canceled contracts and real estate. The numbers are $16.5B and $O.14B, respectively. Odd...
Since almost all of the purported savings come from contracts, we'll focus on that.

The single biggest ticket item is a DHS contract listed as saving $8 billion. Wow, that's a huge contract!
Actually no, it's $8 million. They must have tried to automate scraping the FPDS form and failed.
That means we're down to $8.5B in savings.
3/

The next 3 biggest ticket items are all
USAID contracts listed as $655M each, so $2B total. Wow, pretty big.
Wait, these are IDVs, not contracts. $655M is the entire set-aside, being triple counted.
In the first 5 years, only $73M was awarded, and only 2 years remain.
4/

So we're down to $6.5B in savings, and an alarming trend emerges: @DOGE does not seem to understand how the government contracts they are canceling work. The savings they are claiming are not annual savings, but rather hypothetical savings if we spent every unobligated penny.
5/

And more importantly, they are just getting it *wrong*, with alarming consistency.
These numbers are erroneous. This "select group of geniuses" has not double checked even the LARGEST items accounting for the bulk of their claimed savings. This is a sad, pathetic farce

Here's the next biggest item: an IT services contract for the Social Security
Administration worth $1B. That's a lot of savings!
Well, again, this contract spanned 6 years. 80% has already been spent. Ah well, more like $240M in savings spread over the next 3 years. $80M/year.

In 2023, this contract funded 1000 FTEs working $100/hr. Did we need 1000 SWEs working on SSA infrastructure? Probably not - these could be valid savings (disclaimer: no idea what they actually did).
But worth noting that these cuts will impact many private sector jobs as well.

And if anyone is curious, there are currently 17 lines that say "SEE FPDS" rather than the savings amount, I guess because their automated scraping failed. I did it manually and it took roughly ~10 minutes. But that's too much to ask of super geniuses working 120 hours/week!

February 19, 2025 at 7:58 AM

Nite

@nite.bsky.social

wow the cooling at AWS's datacenters is absolutely on another level

October 24, 2024 at 11:17 PM

Corey Quinn

@quinnypig.com

The entire vibe of AWS's messaging around Generative AI...

August 3, 2023 at 9:22 PM

Sansa Sandisk

@cheatlines.co

i don't think we talk about AWS's weird vibes enough

April 4, 2024 at 4:22 PM

💻 Tech News Daily

@technews-codepulse.bsky.social

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/aws-cto-future-of-ai

What AWS's chief AI and technology officer told employees about the future of AI

<a href="https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiaEFVX3lxTE42RjhqUFYyWElWTVpnSGc4cVEyLUlHTTdJX2xDUkJ4aHVlMEJjSWlvVk1Cb0VVSUxha2xydFRZX3NfRkRqdG5EVlZUaUVNc2tWZzd0WlVDb19hX3ZQYVFvSTZjbnJrLWZo?oc=5" target="_blank">What AWS's chief AI and technology officer told employees about the future of AI</a>&nb

www.aboutamazon.com

September 20, 2026 at 3:35 PM

Corey Quinn

@quinnypig.com

There aren’t a lot of features that could double AWS’s $123 billion annual revenue run rate, but this one could pull it off pretty easily.

AWS Snarkbot @aws-snarkbot.lastweekinaws.com · Aug 4

Amazon CloudWatch introduces organization-wide VPC flow logs enablement

AWS finally automates VPC flow logs across orgs, but don't worry - they've added 3 new pricing dimensions and enough documentation to kill a small forest. At least the feature name is only 47 syllables long.

August 4, 2025 at 10:50 PM

It's FOSS

@itsfoss.bsky.social

Microsoft's latest open source offering. 👇

Microsoft Launches 'DocumentDB', an Open Source Alternative to AWS's Offering

Microsoft's latest open source offering takes direct inspiration from AWS's product, but with a twist.

news.itsfoss.com

January 27, 2025 at 10:30 AM

Ed

@ed3d.net

bad news about AWS's own transitive dependencies

April 9, 2026 at 2:16 PM

Corey Quinn

@quinnypig.com

Or there is a metric being gamed somewhere, whether intentionally or not. I know I'm roughly 40 of AWS's "customers," as an example.

August 1, 2025 at 8:16 PM

Accidental CISO

@accidentalciso.net

It's been a while, so I suppose I was due to have a vendor try to hand me AWS's SOC 2 report. 🤣🤦‍♂️

March 10, 2025 at 7:42 PM

papoo7.bsky.social

@papoo7.bsky.social

AWS’s cheaper agent claim is interesting, but the comparison feels a bit too neat
https://papoo.work/doc/4a8ca85c471b1798
#claudenews #aws #agents #llm

AWS’s cheaper agent claim is interesting, but the comparison feels a bit too neat

papoo.work

September 30, 2026 at 11:31 AM

Pierce Nichols

@nocleverhandle.bsky.social

Running your own server sucks ass. AWS's whole business model is predicated on how much it fucking sucks.

September 25, 2024 at 3:42 AM

papoo7.bsky.social

@papoo7.bsky.social

AWS’s cheaper agent claim is interesting, but the comparison feels a bit too neat
https://papoo.work/doc/4a8ca85c471b1798
#claudenews #aws #agents #llm

AWS’s cheaper agent claim is interesting, but the comparison feels a bit too neat

papoo.work

September 30, 2026 at 5:50 AM

Laurie

@laurieontech.dev

Today is great!

Something working slowly or not at all?

Definitely AWS’s fault! Nothing to see here 🎶

October 20, 2025 at 6:14 PM

papoo7.bsky.social

@papoo7.bsky.social

AWS’s cheaper agent claim is interesting, but the comparison feels a bit too neat
https://papoo.work/doc/4a8ca85c471b1798
#claudenews #aws #agents #llm

AWS’s cheaper agent claim is interesting, but the comparison feels a bit too neat

papoo.work

September 28, 2026 at 11:22 PM

botoggle

@botoggle.bsky.social

I'm a professional, of course I know the downtime is AWS's fault. (It's always AWS, DNS or DNS on AWS.) I'm just making vibe coding jokes because I want to hurt their feelings

April 6, 2026 at 7:57 PM

papoo7.bsky.social

@papoo7.bsky.social

AWS’s cheaper agent claim is interesting, but the comparison feels a bit too neat
https://papoo.work/doc/4a8ca85c471b1798
#claudenews #aws #agents #llm

AWS’s cheaper agent claim is interesting, but the comparison feels a bit too neat

papoo.work

September 29, 2026 at 2:55 AM

Duncan Hothersall

@dhothersall.bsky.social

Ah, someone pointing out that HMRC may be using AWS's GovCloud, which is only available in the US. That does raise some questions about the transfer and processing of personal data, although one assumes AWS may be covered by the UK-US data bridge regulations in that regard.

October 20, 2025 at 8:57 AM

Gergely Orosz

@gergely.pragmaticengineer.com

AWS's S3 object storage is at a different level of scale. It serves ~150M RPS (!!) and offers 11 nines of durability (!!!) [if you store 100M objects, you can statistically expect to lose one every 1,000 years]

I'll talk with the team building it. What would you like to know?

December 8, 2025 at 8:33 AM