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There’s an expression at Amazon, adopted from our Indian colleagues: do the needful. It means do what’s necessary to accomplish your objective and don’t worry

There’s an expression at Amazon, adopted from our Indian colleagues: do the needful. It means do what’s necessary to accomplish your objective and don’t worry so much about what the “right” approach is — that you should feel empowered to solve problems, not get caught up in the never ending stream of people yelling about what is “correct”. Your goal is to release a product, and you have a tight deadline, so use the tools that let you accomplish that — what you’re familiar with, what you understand, and what enables you to work quickly. If Kubernetes authors have opinions about how you work, they should show some customer obsession and release a product you can effectively use. That’s not your problem. Your problem is releasing your app. Do the needful. There’s no shame in that. For some meme fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0fMHt2edZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0fMHt2edZc

ken 7y ago
This explains a lot of the strange engineering I've seen from Amazon over the past several years. Like why there's almost no coherence among the AWS services, or why the error-handling and documentation is never up to par, or why they're happy to throw away a library and replace it with another one with a completely different interface. Amazon doesn't need these things! I will say that this behavior has generated absolutely zero loyalty in me. The only reason I use any Amazon service today is because I made that decision in the past, and it's more work to change. They look to me like the Blackberry of web services right now. It works, and they have millions of customers, but they simply don't comprehend how much better the experience could be.