Here’s what our cloud hosts had to say about this week’s episode: 341: AWS Layoffs: Scaling Down Instead of Scaling Out
Justin Brodley
I was traveling for my day job this week in Bengaluru, which means Matt and Ryan had to carry the show without me. There was a time in the early days where me being out meant the episode just… didn’t happen. But after years of chastising and warnings, the guys have learned — and they put together a great episode this week. Proud of them. Mostly.
The big story this week is the Amazon layoffs — 16,000 roles cut, with a lot of the impact landing squarely on AWS engineering teams including Bedrock AI, Redshift, and ProServe. This follows a trend across the industry that I find pretty disappointing: companies are investing billions in AI while simultaneously showing thousands of people the door. The people who built the platforms generating today’s revenue are being cut to fund tomorrow’s AI bets. I get that business evolves, but the human cost of these “efficiency” moves deserves more than a corporate memo. If you’ve been impacted, my DMs are open.
The SpaceX-xAI merger and the million-satellite orbital data center pitch is… ambitious. Ryan called it a shell game and I’m inclined to agree. The Notepad++ supply chain compromise is genuinely alarming — state-sponsored attackers sitting inside update infrastructure for seven months through a shared hosting provider. That’s a wake-up call for anyone relying on open source tooling. And on the AWS side, CloudFront getting proper mTLS for origins and EventBridge bumping to 1MB payloads are the kind of boring-but-essential improvements that actually make engineers’ lives better. Oh, and the console finally shows account names instead of 12-digit numbers. Matt called it the most useful feature of the podcast and he’s not wrong
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