Why would Amazon dunk on their own Serverless?

David writes...

I read the Prime Video case study you discussed on episode 517. Before, they were reading and writing decoded media over
the network, to S3. After re-architecting, they were reading and writing that data to memory allocated to a common
container/VM. The fact that they saw 90% efficiency gains should not surprise anyone. Serverless is only relevant to the
conversation if it forced the Prime Video team to substitute S3 for in-memory access (which it probably did).

What I find surprising, is why their architects thought that network calls could outperform memory calls in the first
place. My guess is they didn't, but that the Serverless teams at Amazon forced the Prime Video team to adopt their
products for marketing purposes. Serverless is completely proprietary to cloud vendors, whereas virtual machines,
containers and Kubernetes are not. It's easy to see why Amazon's leadership wanted to create and promote serverless
products: they wanted to minimize opportunities for competition by vendor-locking all their customers.

But this doesn't explain why Amazon would allow the Prime Video team to publish such an indictment of their own
serverless offerings. Either this is a corporate feud spilling out into public, or Amazon may be wanting to pull the
plug on these serverless offerings, or maybe a combination of both. There have been a lot of layoffs at Amazon lately,
not just in retail, but also in their AWS division. And if you are going to downsize, you'd start first with the
Serverless teams, since under the hood, all that stuff depends on VMs and containers.

If Amazon were to start discontinuing Serverless products, they would want to persuade as many users as possible to
voluntarily migrate themselves, to minimize the backlash from pulling the plug on paying customers. I don't have inside
knowledge; this is just speculation on my part.

I have been sour on Serverless from the beginning, so seeing all this stuff go away would not grieve me. But I find it
ironic that efficiency is being used to justify migration away from Serverless. Didn't Amazon and the other big cloud
providers advertise efficiency gains to promote Serverless adoption in the first place?

Love the show, keep up the great work,
David