Episode Details

About Corey Quinn

Over the course of my career, I’ve worn many different hats in the tech world: systems administrator, systems engineer, director of technical operations, and director of DevOps, to name a few. Today, I’m a cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, the author of the weekly Last Week in AWS newsletter, and the host of two podcasts: Screaming in the Cloud and, you guessed it, AWS Morning Brief, which you’re about to listen to.

Links

• CHAOSSEARCH
• @QuinnyPig

Transcript

Corey: Welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Whiteboard Confessional. I’m Cloud Economist Corey Quinn. This weekly show exposes the semi-polite lie that is whiteboard architecture diagrams. You see, a child can draw a whiteboard architecture, but the real world is a mess. We discuss the hilariously bad decisions that make it into shipping products, the unfortunate hacks the real-world forces us to build, and that the best to call your staging environment is “theory”. Because invariably whatever you’ve built works in the theory, but not in production. Let’s get to it.

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Welcome to the AWS Morning Brief: Whiteboard Confessional. I am Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, which means that I fix the horrifying AWS bill both by making it more understandable, as well as lower. On today's episode of the AWS Morning Brief: Whiteboard Confessional, I looked around the whiteboards in the backgrounds of the Zoom calls that I'm having with basically everyone these days because going to the office during a pandemic is and remains a deadly risk, and it's amazing how much you can learn about people's companies by what they leave on the whiteboards. Whether you happen to be visiting their office or left inattentively in the background because they forget that they didn't turn on the Zoom background. 

One of the most disturbing things that we'll see on any whiteboard in any company that you work at, ever, is an org chart. And what makes it disturbing, first off, is that when you see an org chart, that means that generally, someone is considering reorganizing, which is a polite framing of shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. It ties into one of the great corporate delusions that somehow you're going to start immediately making good decisions, and all of the previous poor decision making you've made is going to fall away like dew in the new morning. And the reason that that's the case is that everyone tends to be an optimist when lookin