Mike Julian

Just realized every major Vegas strip hotel is now unionized.

Venetian unionized last August. I wonder how long before "Relocate re:Invent" made it to someone's agenda--minutes? hours? 😆

Bee is joining Amazon and we couldn’t be more excited! | Maria de Lourdes Zollo Bee is joining Amazon and we couldn’t be more excited! When we started Bee, we imagined a world where AI is truly personal, where your life is understood and enhanced by technology that learns with ...

Amazon acquiring Bee is a pretty strong admission that they can't make Alexa work.

www.linkedin.com/posts/activi...

Just doin some wild shit in studio with @quinnypig.com today 🤘

Now that AWS fixed the free tier, I think the next biggest technical absurdity, in terms of a thing that seems like a decision made outside of technical considerations, is how you can't move an S3 bucket between accounts.

"Being a founder is, well, it actually sucks. It's oddly like being repeatedly punched in the face."

🤣

too real

Thoughts on Motivation and My 40-Year Career I’ve never published an essay quite like this. I’ve written about my life before, reams of stuff actually, because that’s how I process what I think, but never for public consumption. I’ve been pus…

New post up, with a bunch of thoughts on what drives me personally, and my own 40-year career (h/t @lethain.com).

I have a pretty unusual life story. But one of the reasons I love the tech industry so much is how common unusual stories like mine have historically been.

charity.wtf/2025/07/09/t...

I was being generous given we've got Garman running the show instead of Andy now

but alas, you're probably right 😆

It has:

- its own social media handles
- clear per-user pricing instead of consumption pricing
- its own branding instead of AWS's
- a docs page that's clear and helpful
- questions handled via Discord and Github instead of re:Post

yeah, I give it 12 months before some exec trips over themselves

In before an Amazon exec realizes a product team made something unique and interesting and ruins it by bringing it back into the fold a la Lightsail.

The problem I have with modern observability tools is that I feel like an idiot trying to figure out how to use them.

A Day in the Life of Server #47B-2: An AWS Data Center Memoir Or: Surprise! I Contain Multitudes and Also Your “Serverless” Functions

Ever wondered what is a day in the life of a server in an AWS data center ?

@quinnypig.com has it covered for you

www.lastweekinaws.co...

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Duckbill Group Office Hours. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar. • Get personalized advice on your AWS cost optimization strategy • Ask questions about confusing billing elements • Learn about AWS contract negotiations • Connect with FinOps professionals who unders...

I'm hosting the @duckbillgroup.com office hours in ten minutes!

If you have questions about #AWS contracts, cost optimization, or #FinOps in general, come on over!

zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Think throwing money at fancy cloud cost management tools will solve your AWS spending problems? Here's why that approach fails: Most companies have fewer th... Cloud Cost Tools Won't Fix Your AWS Bill (Here's Why)

Want to know the most telling metric about cloud cost management tools? Check how many people actually USE them.

Great tools matter, but without the right people driving your strategy, they're just expensive dashboards collecting dust.

What To Do When You’re Underwater on Your AWS EDP Underwater? Let’s go swimming. You have options…

Missing your AWS EDP commitment? Don’t panic. If you’re 10–15% underwater, doing nothing might be optimal since shortfall fees use discounted rates. Focus on total savings, not perfect forecasting.

Stop assuming Finance wants a detailed justification of every dollar in your cloud bill. What they really want is confidence - confidence that someone unders... The Finance-Engineering Gap in Cloud Costs: A Simple Fix

Finance and Engineering need couples therapy when it comes to cloud costs.

Finance wants confidence in the numbers and trajectory.

Engineering thinks they need to defend every dollar. Better understanding leads to better outcomes.

youtube.com/shorts/XY4Ax...

I have managed multiple teams at a company with a hybrid schedule. I have also been hiring pretty consistently for years now (basically until like a month ago).

One thing I hear from candidates often is that they are actively excited to come into the office a few times a week to be around others.

You can skate by with informal knowledge and keeping state in people's heads and making it accessible via in-person conversation if you are in person. Mandatory written artifacts create a lot of overhead for many people if they are not reading and writing first people.

Here's something crucial about cloud costs that most people miss: Engineering teams are shipping features because that's exactly what they should be doing. T... Why Engineering Teams Don't Focus On AWS Costs

The foundation of cloud cost management isn't about optimization—it's about understanding why engineering teams make the decisions they do.

Start there, and meaningful optimization follows.

Introducing the AWS Product Lifecycle page and AWS service availability updates | Amazon Web Services Today, we’re introducing the AWS Product Lifecycle page, a centralized resource that provides comprehensive information about service availability changes across AWS. The new AWS Product Lifecycle pag...

This is great to see AWS centralizing info about their end of life products in one place! Hopefully I'll eventually be able to retire github.com/SummitRoute/...

aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in...

Freeman & Forrest is a year old! It's been a wild, incredible journey and we've learned so much.

I'm remembering an executive we pitched early on who called us a "small business for shitty little companies."

Anyway, we've paid technical content creators $1.7M. I'm proud of that. fnf.dev/one-year

AWS VPC endpoint interface support for AZs is chaos. Of the 392 services these endpoints support, 75 services are not available in all AZs in us-east-1. You think, ok use1-az3 is probably missing support for some, because of course it is, because it's cursed and you'd be right, it's the worst, but

The reality of scaling cloud cost management hits hard: your central team can't do it all. Learn how successful enterprises shift from centralized control to... Scale Your Cost Management Like This

Your cloud cost management central team can't handle it all forever.

The path to scale is through decentralization - equipping teams across the organization with the tools, standards, and processes to manage their own costs.

Enable, don't control.

Pretty common case that we see $500k-$750k a month on cloudwatch logs in our enterprise customers. This is great.

Think AWS cost management is all about finding idle resources and resizing instances? Think again. The real impact on your cloud costs comes from your archit... The BIGGEST AWS Cost Driver Nobody Talks About

Want to make a real dent in your AWS costs?

Stop obsessing over turning off unused resources.

Start examining your architectural choices.

How you design your application matters more than how you optimize individual components.

youtube.com/shorts/bVJYT...

Today's self-own: introducing the eng team to quines

Optimizing cost for using foundational models with Amazon Bedrock

Amazon Bedrock cost optimization: Choose pricing options, select models wisely, optimize knowledge bases, use prompt caching, and leverage automated reasoning. Balance capability and cost with managed AI models on AWS.

We do a lot of hard work on whiteboards over here.

Chief among them is this graph explaining the quality distribution of burritos in SF vs the national stage. 🌯🌯🌯

Great, ANOTHER reservation expression to keep track of. Just what absolutely no customer wanted.

That’s significant.

Indeed! Hanging out in Nantahala (way) outside Robbinsville, NC.