Is AWS's complexity now prohibitive for most developers and are they still looking for a more simplified way to build applications?

It's a sign of AWS's success that they've been able to launch so many services, but I also think that it has shown itself as a real challenge for them. You've got companies that make their entire living off of just getting paid to sort out Amazon bills. Corey Quinn from the Duckbill Group -- their whole business is they will come in and look at your Amazon bill and help you understand where you spent money and why. When a service hits that level of complexity, it's clear you can build anything you want on AWS, but it's also clear that you can accidentally shoot yourself in the foot.

You'll see a lot of really heartbreaking stories of students who are trying to learn, and they accidentally run up a $40,000 AWS bill because they turned the service on as part of a tutorial and didn't realize how expensive it was and let it run. Those sorts of things are really hard, because that it's real money when you run that service. It's not like Amazon's just charging you for nothing. They spent all that money, and they're just charging you back. It's a very challenging place to be when it really is like going in with no safety net at all. You're in these services, and if you don't get what you're doing, you can really get yourself into a pickle.

I think that we're looking for the next layer of abstraction. How do we make cloud services safer? How do we let a web dev who has just joined a team push to production with no risk that you're going to accidentally run up a $40,000 bill if you don't pay attention to your AWS account for two weeks?