Amazon Web Services' most vocal customer now runs EC2

PAAS AND IAAS

Retail foundation leader Dave Treadwell takes over as senior leader and 19-year vet Dave Brown departs for pastures unknown

Dave Brown, a 19-year veteran of AWS and member of its S-team leadership cabal, is leaving Amazon for parts undisclosed.

It's hard to overstate Dave's impact on AWS; the few times I've met him, it was very clear that there was nothing I could trot out in the realm of "arcane EC2 trivia" that he didn't go orders of magnitude deeper on with zero forewarning.

This is a titanic loss for AWS, because that's roughly how deep Dave routinely dove. He'll be handing the reins over to fellow S-team member Dave Treadwell, currently the head of Amazon Retail's "eCommerce Foundation" (itself an upscale term for "bargain basement").

Brown probably isn't going to be a direct competitor (though he's definitionally going to some Amazon competitor short of his next move being "philanthropy"), unless the two-week notice period is simply a bunch of Amazonian goons beating the tar out of him in a dark room around the clock until August.

But the interesting part to me is that suddenly Dave Treadwell has an enviable job.

Think about it for a second: Amazon retail was, for a time, the largest AWS customer — and certainly one of the most complicated. If I think I have beef about AWS-isms, there's no doubt that "Tread," as he's apparently called, has mountains to my molehill of complaints.

So if I can slip into his role for a second, here would be my to-do list if I were coming from an Amazon Retail background and suddenly had EC2 bequeathed to me to run:

1. GPU capacity acquisition: Special people get special allocation rules, balanced between Capacity Blocks, war-clicking past InsufficientInstanceCapacity screens, and having to know a guy. Amazon has an entire internal project to solve this for its own teams. If I'm Tread, take a page from retail and smash Spot Fleet dynamics into a proper capacity marketplace. "Only 2 p6-b300.48xlarge left in stock. Ships from and sold by GPUZ4LOLZ (91% positive feedback)."

2. Savings plans / Reserved Instances archaeology: These sometimes-but-often-not overlapping discount vehicles were clearly designed by folks who never had to explain them to a CFO with anger management issues. Treadwell has a golden opportunity here to roll out dynamic raw pricing: on-demand rates that themselves fluctuate hourly like a third-party listing on discontinued and incompatible printer ink, replacing traditional commitment vehicles with a "Subscribe & Save 5%" toggle on vCPUs.

3. Instance type proliferation: As of this writing, there are 1,354 EC2 instance types available in us-east-1 alone, and the console picker assumes that you already know the correct answer. Riiiight. There's a solution here! "Customers who launched m7i.large also launched ..." combined with sponsored placement by EC2 sub-departments means the top result is now suddenly the instance family that AWS overbought. Is this the best instance for the customer? Who gives a rat's ass; it's what's best for Amazon, a north star that Amazon Retail has been chasing for years.

4. SageMaker is someone's empire-building project: There are over 35 SageMaker products, or features, or whatever the distinction is supposed to be at AWS. Tread should leave this alone, and introduce the amazing source of truth that is Customer Reviews. "1 star. Not as described. Arrived as Jupyter notebook; what the hell do I do with it?" They can repurpose their fake review detection to take down fraudulent reviews from other SageMaker sub-teams.

5. Quota request supplication: You know the drill; beg, plead, and wait for the privilege to give AWS more money. The fix here is almost too easy; y'know who doesn't have to wait for quota increases? That's right: Amazon Prime members.

That's the easy punch list if it were me. But I'm me, and Tread is not. I'm sure he's got planned more treats with far greater nuance and customer hostility; we'll know for sure that he's settled in when the EC2 section of our AWS bills starts including ads - and when Josh Pigford's excellent Knockoff extension starts working in the EC2 console. ®