# S2 E8: Bit: AWS

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2024-04-22
- **Format:** Video · 51 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Industry trends, Tool strategy, Data engineering
- **Tools:** Tableau (embedding, server)
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/s2-e8-bit-aws
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niuXFYOxWT0

In this Datum episode, Ravi and I step away from our usual analytics focus to talk through Amazon Web Services and the wider cloud market. We catch up on the Tableau Conference, Blueprint, embedded analytics and a drone trip to Ireland, then dig into AWS's history, pricing model, multi-cloud strategies and how the cloud wars are shaping up between Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

## Key takeaways

- AWS grew out of Amazon's internal philosophy of modularising every component it built, then monetising spare computing capacity at scale through services like S3 and SQS.
- Spot pricing effectively turns server infrastructure into an auction, letting you run non-urgent jobs cheaply whenever capacity is available.
- Multi-cloud setups (as used by Dropbox and Apple) let enterprises keep critical or cheaper-to-run components in-house while delegating the rest, but they require significant maturity to manage.
- Competitive advantage in cloud is shifting from commodity hardware towards custom silicon, with Google's TPUs and Apple's chip design pointing the way.
- Tableau's Embed licence now allows visualisations to be served to external customers without internal logins, but embedding involves many moving parts and Tableau stops being the sole focus.

## Chapters

- 0:01 Apology and summer catch-up
- 1:15 Tableau Conference and Blueprint
- 3:30 Drone trip to Ireland
- 5:41 Tableau Embedded analytics
- 8:27 Introducing AWS
- 10:30 History and philosophy of AWS
- 18:19 Spot pricing and economics
- 19:59 Multi-cloud strategy
- 22:01 The cloud wars and rivals
- 24:41 Security and trust concerns
- 38:13 Learning platforms and UX compared
- 44:20 What the cloud means for analytics

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/s2-e8-bit-aws

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena