There was a time before Amazon and AWS were Enterprise Ready

It is hard for many to remember when Amazon and AWS weren't really enterprise-ready.  AWS wasn't really AWS in the beginning. It was really a scalable data center. The company restricted its employees to locations where the Amazon store collected sales tax which really ended in 2016.  Amazon pivoted to PaaS with the introduction of S3 and EC2 in 2012.  This is when AWS started moving from being a data center to the internet's operating system 

Amazon Called and I had no idea what they were thinking

An Amazon cloud engineer called me in the early 2010s wanting to know if I was interested in a Field Engineering position with AWS. I had worked for a few vendors by this point and was pretty interested. 

There were only two field/cloud/customer engineers covering the entire USA, and possibly the planet. I don't remember if they had anything outside the USA.  Both engineers worked in Seattle. 

We discussed how they worked at that time. I couldn't see how it would be successful with enterprise customers and said so.
  1. All personnel had to work out of Virginia or Washington
  2. Amazon employees weren't allowed to go to customer sites because they didn't want to do business in states other than VA and WA.
  3. Customers had to travel to Virginia or Washington for in-person meetings. Video conferencing existed but it wasn't the easy on-demand service we have today when anyone can spin up a meeting of 50 people without thinking about it.
  4. Most vendors had bonus programs for engineers tied to sales.  Amazon didn't have any of that.  
  5. Most vendors paid about 20% more for Field Architects / Sales Engineers because people that were technical and adaptable to various business situations weren't always easy to find. Amazon didn't intend to do that.
I described how I thought they were not going to succeed with only Skype. Then I described how other vendors interacted with customers and how they paid.  I was sorry that I just didn't think the model would work with enterprises that liked high-touch care and attention. 

A few years later Amazon started collecting sales tax everywhere. All the restrictions were removed. They visited people everywhere. They incentivized people with stock instead of quota bonuses. The products continued to improve and previously unimaginable rates. They hired people everywhere and ended up with 10s of thousands of field people.

Redux

It is one of those pivot points where you wonder if you should have taken a different tack.  Taking the job could have been a blast and a huge windfall. It could have been an exercise in frustration with an early exit.  I can't remember the name of the person I talked to. I hope their ride was great and that it turned out to be the experience that they thought it would be.

Video

Revision History

Created 2022 04
Video Created 2023 03

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Installing the RNDIS driver on Windows 11 to use USB Raspberry Pi as network attached

Image
I do a lot of my development and configuration via ssh into my Raspberry Pi Zero over the RNDIS connection. Some models of the Raspberry PIs can be configured with  gadget drivers  that let the Raspberry pi emulate different devices when plugged into computers via USB. My favorite gadget  is the network profile that makes a Raspberry Pi look like an RNDIS-attached network device.  All types of network services travel over an RNDIS device without knowing it is a USB hardware connection. A Raspberry Pi shows up as a Remote NDIS (RNDIS) device when you plug the Pi into a PC or Mac via a USB cable. The gadget  in the Windows Device Manager picture shows this RNDIS Gadget connectivity between a Windows machine and a Raspberry Pi. The Problem Windows 11 and Windows 10 no longer auto-installs the RNDIS driver that makes magic happen. Windows recognizes that the Raspberry Pi is some type of generic USB COM device. Manually running W indows Update  or  Upd...
Read more

Understanding your WSL2 RAM and swap - Changing the default 50%-25%

Image
The Windows Subsystem for Linux operates as a virtual machine that can dynamically grow the amount of RAM to a maximum set at startup time.  Microsoft sets a default maximum RAM available to 50% of the physical memory and a swap-space that is 1/4 of the maximum WSL RAM.  You can scale those numbers up or down to allocate more or less RAM to the Linux instance. The first drawing shows the default WSL memory and swap space sizing. The images below show a developer machine that is running a dev environment in WSL2 and Docker Desktop.  Docker Desktop has two of its own WSL modules that need to be accounted for.  You can see that the memory would actually be oversubscribed, 3 x 50% if every VM used its maximum memory.  The actual amount of memory used is significantly smaller allowing every piece to fit. Click to Enlarge The second drawing shows the memory allocation on my 64GB laptop. WSL Linux defaul...
Read more

Almost PaaS Document Parsing with Tika and AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Image
The Apache Tika project provides a  library capable of parsing and extracting data and meta data from over 1000 file types.  Tika is available as a single jar file that can be included inside applications or as a deployable jar file that runs Tika as a standalone service. This blog describes deploying the Tika jar as an auto-scale service in Amazon AWS Elastic Beanstalk.  I selected Elastic Beanstalk because it supports jar based deployments without any real Infrastructure configuration. Elastic Beanstalk auto-scale should take care of scaling up and down for for the number of requests you get. Tika parses documents and extracts their text completely in memory. Tika was deployed for this blog using EC2 t2.micro instances available in the AWS free tier. t2.micro VMs are 1GB which means that you are restricted in document complexity and size. You would size your instances appropriately for your largest documents.   Preconditions An AWS account. AWS ac...
Read more