Great news!

Mike Julian and Corey Quinn (of Last Week in AWS/Screaming in the Cloud fame) are doing something together: a brand new company. We are merging our companies (Aster Labs and Observable Group on my side, and the Quinn Advisory Group on Corey’s) into a new company known as The Duckbill Group. The company takes its name from Corey’s affinity for large AWS bills, as well as Mike’s intense phobia of ducks. Mike will act as Duckbill Group’s CEO, while Corey will be the Cloud Economist, two words which nobody can define.

The driver behind this is that we are better together. We’ve both been long-time colleagues, and have spent the last three years continually hiring each other to help on various challenges, so it makes sense to just go into business together. We each have extraordinarily complementary skill sets: Corey with his public speaker, cloud standup, and (in)famous snark, and Mike with his penchant for sales, process, and product strategy.

Our newsletters and podcasts won’t be changing; given our new partnership they will doubtless improve as we’re each focusing on areas we’re good at now. Rest assured, Last Week in AWS will have the same snark you know and love, and Monitoring Weekly will continue with its same informative nature.

While we have nothing new to announce today past the merger itself, there are several projects in the works that we look forward to sharing with you in the coming months. Thank you for reading.