[The OpenAI Polycule Moves In Together](https://www.duckbillhq.com/blog/the-openai-polycule-moves-in-together/)

For fourteen years, I had a rotten little chihuahua named Ethel, who was a malevolent scheming weasel. I didn't realize it at the time, but learning to speak "malevolent scheming weasel" was great training for understanding the press releases that AWS puts out semi-regularly. Today, the OpenAI polycule put out a whole swath of press […]

CloudFront now offers bundle pricing, which is handy—but also confusing. Let’s dive in…

AWS launches Database Savings Plans after years of customer requests, offering discounts up to 35% on serverless databases and 20% on instances across services.

For eight years, I’ve watched the same story play out: excited newcomers sign up for AWS thinking they have a free account, only to get blindsided by unexpected charges.

Well, the internet did what the internet does best this week: it collectively lost its mind over a number in an S-1 filing. Figma disclosed they signed a ~$550 million contract with AWS, someone used arithmetic (the secret weapon of Cloud Finance) to determine that this was roughly $300,000 per day on AWS, and suddenly everyone with a social media account became a cloud economics expert.

In short: Amazon’s Aurora DSQL is a technical marvel, but its pricing is absolutely baffling. And I mean just that. They’re not gouging customers. It’s not unfair. How they arrived at their pricing makes sense given the product’s development constraints (presumably including things such as “thou shalt not lose us our corporate ass on this service, as we cannot make it up in volume”). It’s just monumentally confusing.

There’s a continuum, with “Innovation” on one end and “Optimization” on the other. Where are you?

Something strange started happening at re:Invent last year: new EC2 instances started launching without Reserved Instance support.

Yesterday, AWS lobbed a bit of a water balloon into my inbox.…

In a move that’s equal parts predictable and surprising, AWS has decided to make their Valkey-based services significantly cheaper than their Redis counterparts.

Don’t worry, Reserved Instances will still be around. You just don’t have to think about them anymore unless you want to.