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Comment by zxcvbn4038 | Hacker News Reader

I think we are learning everything that uses AWS Kinesis internally which is cool. It’s always fascinating to learn how AWS works on the backend.

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I work at AWS. I can tell you surely enough it's not pretty or easy to work with. Design and architecture are great here but implementation of that is pretty crap...

Why use it then? (api is crap, uptime is crap, limits are crap... politics?)

Money. Lack of alternatives.

Cheaper than GCP. Still less crappy than Azure.

Because business authorised it's use. The final say on using AWS doesn't belong to tech but busines and AWS is very good at the sales game. I went to one of their conferences and it was mostly business people and sales pitches.

Thats too bad, I always imagined the backend was as magical as what AWS users see. I still wish I could have a peek at how S3 works or IAM. Not enough to get a job at AWS - I know they'd fire me the first time I left early for a parent teacher conference or took a sick day, so why put myself in that position.

I would be beyond fascinated at how IAM works under the hood.

The only thing magical about AWS' backend is how much manpower they can throw at things.

Amazon doesn't have a good engineering culture. It's all about shipping things as fast as possible. People get promoted an leave for other teams, and the new folk gets burned out due to on-call load while trying to fix crappy software they have inherited.

From what I understand AWS and Amazon are two separate dev groups. Does your statement cover all of Amazon or only AWS?

Why don't the new folk iteratively refactor their systems to remove operational burden? Isn't that part of owning any codebase you didn't write?

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