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I spent some time on core services within amazon. I think theres just no upside in major rewrites when the system is working. Any major outage with cloudfront i

I spent some time on core services within amazon. I think theres just no upside in major rewrites when the system is working. Any major outage with cloudfront is a huge liability for the company, and so AWS decides to just pay their engineers a ton of money to sit there and hammer out operational issues day by day. This is really the secret sauce of AWS, industry leading operations/stability/backward compatibility. On some teams, the work is actually not SWE work, even though people think it is. Its really an on call rotation, with some product related work to keep people busy while they recover from on-call. Managers will never admit it though. There will be good SWE work, but some guy who has been in that same org for 6+ years will quickly snatch the best parts. Less tenured engineers will slog

jwestbury 3y ago
> This is really the secret sauce of AWS, industry leading operations/stability/backward compatibility. After working there for >5 years (premium support at AWS, then EC2), I've found myself missing Amazon's operations culture and observability stack (as well as CI/CD toolchain) at every other job. Carnaval in particular is hugely missed.
GreedClarifies 3y ago
Some truth to what you are saying. AWS is amazing at operations, it came from the top down and was a marvel to observe. It could be company culture based, as Amazon retail is simply an operations company (and perhaps the best one in the world), or it could be personality based and will fade in time due to Charlie and Andy taking new roles. However, from what little I could see of CloudFront it was a cluster **. I didn't see how they could justify that amount of operational load without investing in addressing the root causes. VGery strange.