Last Tuesday, AWS threw a little party to open a brand new office in Amsterdam. Special guest was Werner Vogels, CTO of AWS. Cloudar, being a respected AWS partner, was invited. For Werner, born in Ermelo, the Netherlands, it was like coming home. And it showed.
Of course, the night started with the necessary speeches. Werner had an interesting talk about Culture and Innovation at Amazon. The speeches were followed by shaking hands and the obligatory small talk with those present. He then ended up with the guys from Cloudar. That is where Werner started to relax, drink a beer (well a Heineken), another beer, and then another. And that is where things got interesting.
Werner started to talk about one of the issues customers are facing: the lack of decent developers. Developers that, preferably, can write some kick ass cloud native applications. It’s a bottleneck in many projects. And every application that is not written, is code not running on AWS, and a loss of revenue for the company. So that got them thinking.
“You guys know we are looking for a new location in the US?”, Werner asked. Of course, we said, we read the news. Well, actually he asked: “Jullie weten wel dat we een nieuwe toko zoeken in de States?”, as we all spoke Dutch. But I digress. “It is marketed”, he said, “as a new head quarters. But it is not. It is part of a secret new AWS service we are working on. But I can’t tell you what it is yet. It will be thé main announcement at re:Invent 2018.”
A few beers later, however, Werner got so excited, that he started to spill the beans. “You know our customers need developers during projects. The more developers they have, the faster a project can be delivered, and the smaller the time to market. Finding these developers, is a big big problem. Well, we will provide them to our customers. What they need, when they need it, no matter how many they need. We will call it AWS Elastic Developers.”
We were dumbfounded and flabbergasted at the same time. Talk about a scoop! As even more beer went into Werner, more details came out. This is what we have for now. At launch, Node.js, Python and C# developers will be available. But support for Go is in the works. In terms of pricing, you will be able to pay per line of code or per development hour.
“So how will it work, Werner?”, we asked. “Do we need to come with complete functional analysis documentation and have endless meetings with the developers?” Werner smiled. “Alexa, my dear Belgian friends, Alexa. All you need is a cheap Echo dot. Just simply state your requirements, Alexa will ask you everything the devs will need to know, and then you can kick back and relax. AWS SageMaker will do the rest.”
“But Werner,” we asked, “do you really want to support all the code these developers will produce? Thousands and millions of lines of code. Think about the sheer amount of bugs!” “Ah,” Werner replied, “that is the beauty. Through the incorporation of AI and Machine Learning into our Code Pipeline, the code will be 100% bug free!” At which he stood up, murmured something about Oracle software, went to the bar, had a last beer, and disappeared into the Amsterdam night life.
Edwin
Great post guys on the first day of Q2 😉