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Some services (before I left) just did not have the sheer capacity to have Amazon.com as a customer at peak. The service teams just said "nope, sorry, you're going to kill us".

The requirements for prime day/black friday/cyber monday were mind-boggling.

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That was quickly adjusted. I think like 3 years ago, Amazon publicly was saying that every day to AWS they were adding the same amount of computing power that was used to run Amazon.com when it was a $10 billion business. AWS is massively greater in scale than Amazon.com at this point.

Scaling services for many independent businesses is somewhat of a different challenge than “vertically” scaling for one large one like amazon.com.

I cannot confirm or deny that (since my memories are sorta fuzzy), but the real problem was not EC2 capacity. Many other AWS services were involved. :)

This is not right from an infra POV. You are just moving the problem (by team) but it doesn’t go away. Then you end up with duplication.

At the same time you are also giving the other team more flexibility to solve the problem, as they can optimize it for the Amazon.com use case and are not constrained to a generic solution that is optimized for the masses.

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