Werner Vogels: "Complexity is inevitable"

Welcome to Runtime! Today: Amazon CTO Werner Vogels closes AWS re:Invent 2024 with advice on how to make complex things simple, OpenAI unveils an absurdly expensive subscription plan for its latest model, and the latest enterprise moves.

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Simplicity is hard

LAS VEGAS — By tradition, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels' Thursday keynote speech at re:Invent speaks to the concerns of software developers and system architects who have to actually implement the cloud services purchased by their bosses. Last year, amid a sharp pullback in technology spending, Vogels urged attendees to refocus their attention on controlling costs, but now that companies are once again spending money on new enterprise tech services, those practitioners are once again grappling with the complexity of managing growth.

"Software becomes irrelevant if we don't evolve it," Vogels said, pointing out that companies who fail to add new features and functionality to their applications will quickly become stale as new technology changes the expectations that internal and external customers have for the tools they need to get the job done. The problem is that whenever new components are added to an existing application, it creates enormous potential for something to go wrong in an unexpected way.

"Everything fails, all the time" is a famous quote attributed to Vogels that explains the caretaker mindset required to keep the modern economy online, but he pointed out Thursday that everyone forgets the second part of that quote: "Plan for failure, and nothing will fail."
Much of that planning involves accepting that increased complexity goes hand in hand with growth, but there are two types of complexity: "intended complexity." which architects willingly accept to add new capabilities, and "unintended complexity," which "sneaks in often through changing technologies or a lack of architectural oversight, and it slows you down and it makes systems harder to maintain," he said.
He invoked Tesler's Law, reminding attendees that "complexity can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only move somewhere else."

Vogels proposed several ways that companies can approach "simplexity," which is a terrible word that for the purposes of this discussion we'll pretend actually exists. Complexity may be inevitable, but there are steps companies can take to make their operations as simple as possible, he said.

Companies should build infrastructure that can evolve over time in predictable ways, rather than rushing to ship a 1.0 product that forces teams to spend the next several years bolting new features onto an increasingly unstable tech stack and hoping for the best.
Breaking the problems down into smaller pieces run by smaller groups — the notorious "two-pizza team" structure that Amazon developed — can help, by taking smaller bites of the apple and ensuring if a small part of the infrastructure fails, the blast radius is somewhat contained.
And anything that can be automated should be automated: "Manual input should only be required in those areas that truly require human judgment," Vogels said.

Still, Vogels acknowledged that AWS itself has a role to play in making life simpler for its customers. Over the years he has tended to fall on the "primitives, not frameworks" side of the long-running internal AWS debate over how to build cloud infrastructure, but pointed out that tools like managed databases can make life easier for a lot of customers.

For example, when running a database on AWS in its early days, "the complexity burden was really on our customers," but the company soon introduced a series of managed databases that handled a lot of that complexity.
He also discussed how AWS's newest database released this week, Amazon DSQL, takes on the burden of scaling its performance around the world.
There's nothing about operating a business on the internet in 2024 that comes easy, but AWS will face countless decisions over the rest of the decade between giving customers flexible but complex services versus taking on more of that complexity itself.

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Going pro

OpenAI just marked its second anniversary as one of the most talked-about tech startups in recent history following the Nov. 2022 launch of ChatGPT, and Thursday it announced that its o1 "reasoning" model is now generally available. The final version of that model isn't quite the next-generation model that many expected OpenAI to release this year, but the company said it would be better than the preview version of o1 at coding and math, according to The Verge.

But OpenAI also introduced a new ChatGPT Pro subscription tier for a whopping $200 a month. "As AI becomes more advanced, it will solve increasingly complex and critical problems. It also takes significantly more compute to power these capabilities," OpenAI said as a way of justifying that price.

The new tier allows for "unlimited" access to several of its latest models as well as "o1 pro mode, a version of o1 that uses more compute to think harder and provide even better answers to the hardest problems," the company said. Still, that price point might be difficult to justify for anyone other than the folks working at AI startups that have raised significant amounts of money in the last year.

Enterprise moves

Andy MacMillan is the new CEO of Alteryx, joining the AI analytics company after more than six years as CEO of UserTesting.

Bill Staples is the new CEO of GitLab, replacing Sid Sijbrandij, who is stepping down for health reasons after being diagnosed with cancer last year.

Srinivasan Raghavan is the new chief product officer at Freshworks, following almost two years in a similar role at RingCentral.

Benoit Fouilland is the new chief financial officer at Celonis, joining the company after serving in similar roles at Contentsquare and Firmenich.

Sergej Epp is the new chief information security officer at Sysdig, and Shanta Kohli was promoted to chief marketing officer.

The Runtime roundup

HPE beat Wall Street expectations for revenue and profit thanks to increased demand for AI servers, which increased by 16% during the quarter.

Broadcom reversed plans to handle the top 2,000 VMware accounts itself and will now only take on the top 500, which should placate partners who were up in arms about losing access to those lucrative accounts.

Thanks for reading — see you Saturday!