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10+ year Amazon veteran. AWS has very strict rules around accessing any kind of customer data. All of Amazon has some pretty significant red tape and hurdles t

10+ year Amazon veteran. AWS has very strict rules around accessing any kind of customer data. All of Amazon has some pretty significant red tape and hurdles to get security clearance to launch any piece of working software. No, that won’t stop a shitty product manager from looking over sales data to figure out if a certain business is worth exploiting, but accessing AWS customer data is an entirely different ball game. It’s like: jumping over a fence vs trying to break into Area 51. I can almost guarantee that this egregious level of snooping on AWS customer data would never happen, and if somehow it did happen, it’s a nefarious individual with SIGNIFICANT authority to influence entire teams to extract, analyze, and get insights from this data. Again, I don’t think anyone at Amazons leadership is that insane to put their entire professional career in jeopardy, for something that someone would have a 100% guaranteed leak. The people working there aren’t exactly idiots who’d easily fall in line and do something like this. I’d like to be clear - I’m not defending Amazon. I no longer work there, and for what it’s worth, I think it’s a miserable place to work. A culture of back stabbing, inventing abstractions to drive promotions, people literally crying, disconnected leaders focused more on empire building to get promotions instead of doing what’s actually right for customers. Even then, the notion that AWS could line up teams, even on a secret project to do something so disdainful is an extreme stretch.

skohan 4y ago
But I don't mean they would have to access customer data. If, for instance, they just took a look at how much they were billing certain clients for bandwidth over time, they could already use that as a reasonable growth metric. Do you know for a fact that they don't do that? I know for instance they do something similar in terms of ripping off successful products on Amazon.com as Amazon Basics.
minsc_and_boo 4y ago
Amazon has been caught copying customer products to sell as their own before [1], and AWS has been accused more than once of doing the same [2]. It's a pattern of behavior from Amazon, and given their backstabbing, cut throat culture (that you mentioned) isn't it fair to say that it's possible for Amazon employees looking to get ahead at all costs would violate those strict rules? [1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-india-rigging/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-i... [2] https://archive.ph/M7hLF https://archive.ph/M7hLF
- guelo 4y ago
  It could be that Amazon treats AWS differently than their retail business. Any AWS data stealing scandal could easily drive away multi-million dollar contracts. But they've gone through many retail scandals without seemingly affecting anything.
- scarface74 4y ago
  You’re talking about something completely different. This wasn’t AWS having access to customer workloads. I am current employee at AWS. The amount of alarm bells that would go off, audits and complicity by line level employees to make this feasible and it not come out is astronomical.
  - skohan 4y ago
    Nobody's talking about access to customer workloads. Does Amazon have knowledge about how much they're billing each client for bandwidth?
    - scarface74 4y ago
      I’m going to try my best to look at things from the outside. I’m sure there are some people that do. But AWS also knows what is it’s customers need and would be far more likely to go after those markets. Than go after a second level derivative like bandwidth. I personally couldn’t imagine that it would go over to well if someone wrote a proposal in the form of a PRFAQ saying we should go after $x market because we noticed that a customer’s bandwidth was high.
azemetre 4y ago
I feel like words are very cheap, unless there's literal government regulation and making it a felony, it's all meaningless. What government regulations actually prevent this?
ren_engineer 4y ago
you wouldn't need customer data, you can just look at basic infrastructure stats or even how much they are spending on AWS over time and estimate a startups growth and revenue. AWS rolls out clones of various developer tool startups all the time
toast0 4y ago
I mean it depends on what 'customer data' means. I would hope the files on the vms and s3 and what not are verbotten. That's one meaning of customer data. But what about who is a customer? When I set up some stuff on AWS with a corporate email account, we got emails and phone calls right away from a very interested (and not very useful) sales person; I suspect because the corporate domain was high profile. Email domain is customer data, but it seems they looked at that. (OTOH, maybe all signups get a high touch sales process) Or how about just a top N list of customers by spend (or bandwidth) or top N medium-big customers by growth? That's customer data, and would be super useful for (anti-)competitive reasons, but kind of hard to say no, you can't know who the big customers are.

skohan 4y ago

But I don't mean they would have to access customer data. If, for instance, they just took a look at how much they were billing certain clients for bandwidth over time, they could already use that as a reasonable growth metric. Do you know for a fact that they don't do that? I know for instance they do something similar in terms of ripping off successful products on Amazon.com as Amazon Basics.

minsc_and_boo 4y ago

Amazon has been caught copying customer products to sell as their own before [1], and AWS has been accused more than once of doing the same [2]. It's a pattern of behavior from Amazon, and given their backstabbing, cut throat culture (that you mentioned) isn't it fair to say that it's possible for Amazon employees looking to get ahead at all costs would violate those strict rules? [1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-india-rigging/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-i... [2] https://archive.ph/M7hLF https://archive.ph/M7hLF

guelo 4y ago
It could be that Amazon treats AWS differently than their retail business. Any AWS data stealing scandal could easily drive away multi-million dollar contracts. But they've gone through many retail scandals without seemingly affecting anything.
scarface74 4y ago
You’re talking about something completely different. This wasn’t AWS having access to customer workloads. I am current employee at AWS. The amount of alarm bells that would go off, audits and complicity by line level employees to make this feasible and it not come out is astronomical.
- skohan 4y ago
  Nobody's talking about access to customer workloads. Does Amazon have knowledge about how much they're billing each client for bandwidth?
  - scarface74 4y ago
    I’m going to try my best to look at things from the outside. I’m sure there are some people that do. But AWS also knows what is it’s customers need and would be far more likely to go after those markets. Than go after a second level derivative like bandwidth. I personally couldn’t imagine that it would go over to well if someone wrote a proposal in the form of a PRFAQ saying we should go after $x market because we noticed that a customer’s bandwidth was high.

azemetre 4y ago

I feel like words are very cheap, unless there's literal government regulation and making it a felony, it's all meaningless. What government regulations actually prevent this?

ren_engineer 4y ago

you wouldn't need customer data, you can just look at basic infrastructure stats or even how much they are spending on AWS over time and estimate a startups growth and revenue. AWS rolls out clones of various developer tool startups all the time

toast0 4y ago

I mean it depends on what 'customer data' means. I would hope the files on the vms and s3 and what not are verbotten. That's one meaning of customer data. But what about who is a customer? When I set up some stuff on AWS with a corporate email account, we got emails and phone calls right away from a very interested (and not very useful) sales person; I suspect because the corporate domain was high profile. Email domain is customer data, but it seems they looked at that. (OTOH, maybe all signups get a high touch sales process) Or how about just a top N list of customers by spend (or bandwidth) or top N medium-big customers by growth? That's customer data, and would be super useful for (anti-)competitive reasons, but kind of hard to say no, you can't know who the big customers are.