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The code for the AWS billing system must be glorious. There are so many ways to pay for things, changing constantly, with an enormous number of accounts and eve

The code for the AWS billing system must be glorious. There are so many ways to pay for things, changing constantly, with an enormous number of accounts and even a number or ways to get credits back due to outages, customer support, or discount codes. And they have to account for internal Amazon use too. And bugs can really only be caught by people reimplementing parts of the system to make sure they get the same results.

hinkley 7y ago
I don’t understand why so many people are excited to sign up for something that’s so obviously designed to trick them.
kdeldycke 7y ago
A cloud provider billing system is quite a beast, often overlooked and mostly under appreciated. I built one from scratch and led the team responsible for it. I kept a detailed list of all the things you needs to keep track of at https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-billing https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-billing , and indeed, it's glorious.
tanilama 7y ago
Maybe the fact Amazon is also an e-commerce company helps. Disclaimer: ex-AWS employee
- discodave 7y ago
  I mean, the code for Amazon.com is glorious too so... Certain phrases like "Perl-Mason" will likely induce PTSD-like reactions in some unfortunate people.
gtirloni 7y ago
I wouldn't say glorious but if it's anything like telecom billing system, I'm glad I don't work with them anymore.
- stevekemp 7y ago
  One of my earliest jobs was working for a mobile-phone billing company, in Scotland. Every day we'd use UUCP to copy billing-records from random-systems to a central host, running SCO Unixware. Then the daily "billing run" would total, reconcile, and massage the data. The result of the processing would be a pile of CSV files which would then get further massaged by a collection of Perl scripts. Days I definitely do not miss!
  - abraae 7y ago
    I did some consulting for a Telco on their billing run. It ran on a very, very large computer for its day. The run typically took 16+ hours, sometimes as many as 22 hours, leading to some very white knuckle moments when it threatened to delay the start of the next day's run.
- Aloha 7y ago
  For every telecom company I worked for, billing was a mess.

hinkley 7y ago

I don’t understand why so many people are excited to sign up for something that’s so obviously designed to trick them.

kdeldycke 7y ago

A cloud provider billing system is quite a beast, often overlooked and mostly under appreciated. I built one from scratch and led the team responsible for it. I kept a detailed list of all the things you needs to keep track of at https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-billing https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-billing , and indeed, it's glorious.

tanilama 7y ago

Maybe the fact Amazon is also an e-commerce company helps. Disclaimer: ex-AWS employee

discodave 7y ago
I mean, the code for Amazon.com is glorious too so... Certain phrases like "Perl-Mason" will likely induce PTSD-like reactions in some unfortunate people.

gtirloni 7y ago

I wouldn't say glorious but if it's anything like telecom billing system, I'm glad I don't work with them anymore.

stevekemp 7y ago
One of my earliest jobs was working for a mobile-phone billing company, in Scotland. Every day we'd use UUCP to copy billing-records from random-systems to a central host, running SCO Unixware. Then the daily "billing run" would total, reconcile, and massage the data. The result of the processing would be a pile of CSV files which would then get further massaged by a collection of Perl scripts. Days I definitely do not miss!
- abraae 7y ago
  I did some consulting for a Telco on their billing run. It ran on a very, very large computer for its day. The run typically took 16+ hours, sometimes as many as 22 hours, leading to some very white knuckle moments when it threatened to delay the start of the next day's run.
Aloha 7y ago
For every telecom company I worked for, billing was a mess.