I'm working on several long-form posts about various Cloudy things, but with Amazon now swinging the axe in its AWS division, there's something I want to emphasize for all the engineering folks out there, summed up nicely by Steve Jobs:

Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

I spent the first stage of my career cleaning up technical debt at various clients and organizations, which in turn gave me an understanding for just how short-sighted most organizations operate. Companies spend gobs of cash on IT while complaining it's one of their single biggest expenses (occasionally alternating with labor costs for the top spot), but rarely invest the capital to reduce those costs through simplification. In an effort to have the most marketing buzzwords tied to their products - NFTs, AI, microservices, blockchain, (public) cloud, etc - they chase fads and saddle their engineering teams with tech after tech and no clear support model or timeline in sight.

All of this is to say that as debts are being called in and this manufactured recession begins in earnest, simplicity is a virtue to be elevated up and worked towards. Simplicity saves the organization money on every conceivable metric:

• Systems require fewer engineers to maintain and support
• Lower need for technical support, as users are more likely to grasp and utilize resources independently
• Substantially less capital investment, as extraneous features or supplemental products have been removed
• Lower TCO, as workloads are placed in cost-appropriate areas and asset lifecycles are extended to reflect the slowed pace of improvement

Simplicity ain't glamorous, but it's kept me busy and relatively employed thus far, at least so long as organizations had buy-in for it. As the era of explosive growth ends and value-driven operations begins for the tech sector, simplicity will be a far more valuable skill than expertise on the latest technology fad.

(this is gonna be a boring post despite the lede, sorry)

• You work at X company
• X sells Y company cloud services
• Y company is doing something slightly wrong that costs them $xx million / yr more than it should¹

is it legal to

• offer consulting to Y to improve cost efficiency of using X's cloud services (after you're no longer working for X)
• everything discussed is public knowledge², except you only know about Y's infra mistake because you saw their metrics while working at X

1. You've actually informed the account manager at X who manages Y's account about this, but they declined to bother Y with this information

2. all of the services X offers is documented publicly, and this particular kind of mistake is one that people are generally aware you can make, but Y apparently hasn't noticed they're doing it. You're not telling Y to stop using X, just that they can shuffle around how they do things to save money

creating weird shit in blender!