Amazon has created lot of these "things" (for the lack of a better word) that should be taken with a sack of salt. Door Desk, 2-Pizza Teams, Press Release and F

Amazon has created lot of these "things" (for the lack of a better word) that should be taken with a sack of salt. Door Desk, 2-Pizza Teams, Press Release and Frequently Asked Questions (PRFAQ), API Mandate, AWS as utilizing spare capacity, just to name a few. It's made out to be as if these are religiously practiced at Amazon but that's definitely not the case. I worked at one of the first remote dev centres of Amazon working on an extremely ambitious AWS service. The mandate was imposed with a hammer in the earlier days, to an extent even the code repository was segregated. We couldn't access any internal service, no tools (such as pager-duty). So we ended up building half-ass version of everything ourselves. People at the HQ built a web-service to access customer information but within a few months it languished with no one to maintain. Half the time we would be blocked for someone to give us access to a service. Whenever we raised an issue the answer from HQ was oh yeah use this and this service, they were oblivious to our limitation. We would then play the broken record and they would then go oh, well let's see what we can do. Eventually someone higher up noticed the massive inefficiency and said fuck it and opened up all the access for us. But then everything had to be migrated from half-ass services to the mainstream ones. During my time there I never heard of this API mandate. Now that AWS has gotten massively successful this API mandate gets paraded as if it was all a grand plan. No, it wasn't. It was an experiment that sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. Also there's this troupe about AWS you keep hearing. The story goes that someone realised all the un-utilized server capacity and decided to rent it out. That's absolutely not how it began. That's a typical Amazon marketing speak. Amazon's retail took a very very long time to migrate to AWS. In fact I'm not sure if they are fully on AWS either.