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> I can’t think of a single internal tool at Amazon that is better than a commercial counterpart. I haven't worked at Amazon in 6 years, but when I was last th

by ajkjk 5y ago

> I can’t think of a single internal tool at Amazon that is better than a commercial counterpart. I haven't worked at Amazon in 6 years, but when I was last there, these tools were leaps-and-bounds above publicly-available equivalents: * Pipelines (CI/CD tool. Still better than all alternatives IMO, including the AWS offering for some reason) * Igraph (Amazingly good, wipes the floor with Grafana which I have used since) * TT (ticket tracker) * SIM? the new issue-management system they added to replace Jira. Soooo much better than Jira. But it was pretty new when I left so I don't know what it has become.

jeffe 5y ago
I see the value in a lot of these, but I also have to say one common thread across almost all tooling is bad interfaces clearly designed by backend/generalist engineers doing their own ad-hoc form of design. Having worked with an org that transitioned from bitbucket -> gitlab I also found the development/issues at Amazon to have some big headscratchers on missing features like crux diffs following some unintuitive ruleset, and countless smaller inconveniences.
qvrjuec 5y ago
Agreed with everything above, with the addition of brazil. It was pretty fantastic to work with
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
cmckn 5y ago
The first time I did a CR on multiple packages at once...that's good shit.
- qvrjuec 5y ago
  Ah damn also forgot CRUX. Anyone know tools out there that would allow for review across multiple repos/packages?
andrewguenther 5y ago
Yeah, I was pretty surprised to read this complaint, but I would say iGraph is actually the weakest of the bunch. Logging and metrics tools at Amazon leave a lot to be desired. They get the job done, but definitely not best in class.
- ajkjk 5y ago
  Well, the author sounds like they were mostly a designer, so maybe they didn't work with most of these.
- akrotkov 5y ago
  Incidentally, when I moved to Google after a decade at Amazon, one of the few tools that I missed was iGraph.
doseofreality 5y ago
Jira is bad, but SIM is horrendous. SIM makes Jira look good.
- tandymodel100 5y ago
- ajkjk 5y ago
  tbh it had just rolled out when I left and I was only giving my initial impression. I don't know what it's like to use long-term. Although I _hate_ Jira so maybe I'm biased also.
tandymodel100 5y ago
scubbo 5y ago
Interesting - I (Amazon employee) have a buddy at Grafana who brags about it all the time. I've tinkered with it, and found it slightly more functional than iGraph, but a lot prettier. What do you think iGraph does better? +1 on Pipelines being amazing. A lot of people tell me Jira is better than SIM - haven't had a chance to use the former.

by ajkjk 5y ago

jeffe 5y ago

I see the value in a lot of these, but I also have to say one common thread across almost all tooling is bad interfaces clearly designed by backend/generalist engineers doing their own ad-hoc form of design. Having worked with an org that transitioned from bitbucket -> gitlab I also found the development/issues at Amazon to have some big headscratchers on missing features like crux diffs following some unintuitive ruleset, and countless smaller inconveniences.

qvrjuec 5y ago

Agreed with everything above, with the addition of brazil. It was pretty fantastic to work with

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

cmckn 5y ago

The first time I did a CR on multiple packages at once...that's good shit.

qvrjuec 5y ago
Ah damn also forgot CRUX. Anyone know tools out there that would allow for review across multiple repos/packages?

andrewguenther 5y ago

Yeah, I was pretty surprised to read this complaint, but I would say iGraph is actually the weakest of the bunch. Logging and metrics tools at Amazon leave a lot to be desired. They get the job done, but definitely not best in class.

ajkjk 5y ago
Well, the author sounds like they were mostly a designer, so maybe they didn't work with most of these.
akrotkov 5y ago
Incidentally, when I moved to Google after a decade at Amazon, one of the few tools that I missed was iGraph.

doseofreality 5y ago

Jira is bad, but SIM is horrendous. SIM makes Jira look good.

tandymodel100 5y ago
ajkjk 5y ago
tbh it had just rolled out when I left and I was only giving my initial impression. I don't know what it's like to use long-term. Although I _hate_ Jira so maybe I'm biased also.

tandymodel100 5y ago

scubbo 5y ago

Interesting - I (Amazon employee) have a buddy at Grafana who brags about it all the time. I've tinkered with it, and found it slightly more functional than iGraph, but a lot prettier. What do you think iGraph does better? +1 on Pipelines being amazing. A lot of people tell me Jira is better than SIM - haven't had a chance to use the former.