Better Offline Hater Season: Corey Quinn
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Mar 4, 2026 Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill and sharp AWS critic, joins to argue about cloud complexity and AI infrastructure. Short takes cover runaway AWS bills, the chaos of instance choices, custom chips versus Nvidia, and whether hyperscalers’ AI capex will pay off. Quick, pointed conversations about cloud waste, hardware bets, and realistic AI impact.
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Why AWS Bills Keep Rising
- AWS bills rise mainly from charged-for granular usage and human inertia around forgotten resources.
- Corey Quinn explains S3 added request charges after users abused zero-byte objects, and teams keep resources to avoid risk of outages.
AWS Complexity Causes Cost Confusion
- AWS complexity and internal silos produce hundreds of services and SKUs that no single person fully understands.
- Quinn notes over 200 services and millions of SKUs, so teams default to not turning things off to avoid production risk.
Run Compute Optimizer To Right Size Instances
- Use AWS Compute Optimizer to right-size instances instead of guessing.
- Quinn calls it better than his internal tooling and a free tool that often recommends shrinking or enlarging instances appropriately.