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I think the "FANG" is a deliberate slip-up to point, although it should be obvious that this company is Amazon. From reliable firsthand accounts, it seem to be

I think the "FANG" is a deliberate slip-up to point, although it should be obvious that this company is Amazon. From reliable firsthand accounts, it seem to be an accelerating shitshow. I will never work for Amazon given what I have heard about teams there; but what I am worried about is the impact on AWS, which is the main cloud provider at my work, and has been having more than their usual share of catastrophic region-wide problems this year. If this continues, we might have to rethink and move at least some of our systems to GCP to do some stability comparisons.

reducesuffering 5y ago
Fear not, GCP also has a terrible Amazon-like reputation from inside. Googlers in the know rightly consider it like a separate company with a separate culture (they had to hire lots from Amazon and Oracle). I wouldn't base my infra on anything but actual results, not the insides. (am ex Amazon, and yes Amazon is really really bad, burned out for a year, I could feel the gears in my brain grinding down and doing permanent damage)
- caycep 5y ago
  So ironically, maybe it will be Azure that's the last one left standing?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - joecot 5y ago
    I don't think AWS or GCP will go away any time soon. But I'm going to continue to steer companies I'm involved with away from them. For AWS the cycle always seems to be new product comes out, has a great presentation and white paper, and then when the company tries to implement it, they find a bunch of cracks in the service, or hidden cost traps. Or worse, they don't find either until it's too late. For example on an interview I asked a hiring manager about a time something went not well and how they resolved it, and as soon as she started talking about moving to DynamoDB I started chuckling, because I knew where the story was going. You test out DynamoDB and it works great, then you finally get it to production and find out there's something not performing correctly, and that's when you usually discover you can't actually alter your data structures in production. You either need to completely redo everything, or use the handy money slider to pay AWS more money for reasonable performance. They saw the Oracle DB "throw us money til it works" model and figured out how to automate it. Similar story with Lambda, where they buried the lede on cold starts (especially for VPCs), and gave a wink and nod to using heartbeat requests to keep them warm. Which works right up until you're actually trying to scale the thing, which was supposed to be the whole point. It appears to mostly be resolved now with the move to Nitro and NIC pools for VPCs, but they let people be guinea pigs for that service for years with promises they knew were false. I don't have personal stories for GCP, but my coworkers note similar experiences from their previous forays at other companies. Either way, unless you're extremely smart about it, the myriad of services both offer will lock you in, hard, and it's too easy to keep locking yourself in. It would be a herculean effort for some companies to extricate themselves at this point.
CSMastermind 5y ago
For what it's worth Azure is a very nice platform.
zozbot234 5y ago
> From reliable firsthand accounts, it seem to be an accelerating shitshow. That's quite surprising to me - if FAANG's are the standard, Amazon seem like one of the most technically competent (as well as competence and excellence being properly valued there). Yet OP is describing the opposite.
- boardwaalk 5y ago
  What makes you think that? From the outside the products of all these companies work roughly as well. Not terrible, not outstanding. If anything I probably have strong feeling about not wanting to work with AWS — but I don’t have experience with the other clouds.
  - a0-prw 5y ago
    Netflix is shit. Apple is shit. Google is shit. Facebook is shit. For various reasons, but all from a consumer perspective. At least Amazon Prime does what it says it will. Amazon works for the consumer. I don't buy from them physically anymore, but they are the only FAANG that still seems to offer some value. I think they're all going to crash. Oh, and Tesla too XD
    - TigeriusKirk 5y ago
      It's an excellent point. Whatever else, Amazon delivers to the consumer what they promise to deliver. Pretty rare trait.
    - brayhite 5y ago
      What is the measurement by which Apple, Google, etc doesn’t offer value but Amazon does?
    - chrismcb 5y ago
      What do you mean my prime does what it says it will do? Shipping? They can't always do that. If you are comparing it to Netflix, Netflix is a superior product. I have to force so and restart prime almost everytime I use it. Amazon website has improved a lot over the years, but it is far from what it should be, for a company that just sells stuff Aws isn't bad, but I'm not sure if it is better than the alternatives.

reducesuffering 5y ago

Fear not, GCP also has a terrible Amazon-like reputation from inside. Googlers in the know rightly consider it like a separate company with a separate culture (they had to hire lots from Amazon and Oracle). I wouldn't base my infra on anything but actual results, not the insides. (am ex Amazon, and yes Amazon is really really bad, burned out for a year, I could feel the gears in my brain grinding down and doing permanent damage)

caycep 5y ago
So ironically, maybe it will be Azure that's the last one left standing?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- joecot 5y ago
  I don't think AWS or GCP will go away any time soon. But I'm going to continue to steer companies I'm involved with away from them. For AWS the cycle always seems to be new product comes out, has a great presentation and white paper, and then when the company tries to implement it, they find a bunch of cracks in the service, or hidden cost traps. Or worse, they don't find either until it's too late. For example on an interview I asked a hiring manager about a time something went not well and how they resolved it, and as soon as she started talking about moving to DynamoDB I started chuckling, because I knew where the story was going. You test out DynamoDB and it works great, then you finally get it to production and find out there's something not performing correctly, and that's when you usually discover you can't actually alter your data structures in production. You either need to completely redo everything, or use the handy money slider to pay AWS more money for reasonable performance. They saw the Oracle DB "throw us money til it works" model and figured out how to automate it. Similar story with Lambda, where they buried the lede on cold starts (especially for VPCs), and gave a wink and nod to using heartbeat requests to keep them warm. Which works right up until you're actually trying to scale the thing, which was supposed to be the whole point. It appears to mostly be resolved now with the move to Nitro and NIC pools for VPCs, but they let people be guinea pigs for that service for years with promises they knew were false. I don't have personal stories for GCP, but my coworkers note similar experiences from their previous forays at other companies. Either way, unless you're extremely smart about it, the myriad of services both offer will lock you in, hard, and it's too easy to keep locking yourself in. It would be a herculean effort for some companies to extricate themselves at this point.

CSMastermind 5y ago

For what it's worth Azure is a very nice platform.

zozbot234 5y ago

> From reliable firsthand accounts, it seem to be an accelerating shitshow. That's quite surprising to me - if FAANG's are the standard, Amazon seem like one of the most technically competent (as well as competence and excellence being properly valued there). Yet OP is describing the opposite.

boardwaalk 5y ago
What makes you think that? From the outside the products of all these companies work roughly as well. Not terrible, not outstanding. If anything I probably have strong feeling about not wanting to work with AWS — but I don’t have experience with the other clouds.
- a0-prw 5y ago
  Netflix is shit. Apple is shit. Google is shit. Facebook is shit. For various reasons, but all from a consumer perspective. At least Amazon Prime does what it says it will. Amazon works for the consumer. I don't buy from them physically anymore, but they are the only FAANG that still seems to offer some value. I think they're all going to crash. Oh, and Tesla too XD
  - TigeriusKirk 5y ago
    It's an excellent point. Whatever else, Amazon delivers to the consumer what they promise to deliver. Pretty rare trait.
  - brayhite 5y ago
    What is the measurement by which Apple, Google, etc doesn’t offer value but Amazon does?
  - chrismcb 5y ago
    What do you mean my prime does what it says it will do? Shipping? They can't always do that. If you are comparing it to Netflix, Netflix is a superior product. I have to force so and restart prime almost everytime I use it. Amazon website has improved a lot over the years, but it is far from what it should be, for a company that just sells stuff Aws isn't bad, but I'm not sure if it is better than the alternatives.