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I'm reminded of a story my ex-Amazon friend would tell where it was a week-long process to get an extra $100-something stick of RAM for his workstation when he

I'm reminded of a story my ex-Amazon friend would tell where it was a week-long process to get an extra $100-something stick of RAM for his workstation when he started there, needing various sign-off and escalations for such a grave expense. Meanwhile he was deploying some machine-learning categorization stuff he was working on to some cluster that would cost five figures of compute each time, and nobody batted an eye.

ryanianian 8y ago
This is a pretty common thing within Amazon. Internally it's called being "Frupid" (frugal + stupid). It's one of the reasons I left. Also you have to jump through pretty extreme hoops if your hardware estimates (usually made at least 3 months out) were under-shot and now your service is redlining. This leads to teams way over-estimating their hardware needs and thus millions being spent on idle reserved EC2 capacity. So now they police (with savagery) idle capacity, so services or workloads that are "bursty" are basically an internal-bureaucracy nightmare. It's much nicer to use AWS outside of Amazon :)