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Comment by simonebrunozzi | Hacker News Reader

I worked at AWS at a time when Alyssa was there (running Amazon S3), and the few times I've met her, I can guarantee she was a formidable executive. No surprise she's in the top ranks at Square.

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“Running Amazon s3”… wow, it’s hard to think of many roles that are more fundamental to today’s Internet infrastructure (never lose a byte!) and at the same time quite dull (it’s an object heap after all. Nothing else to see here).

It's easy to underestimate how difficult it is to make a core building block do one thing and do it really good. I mean, Twitter is another frequently cited example; most people with basic software development knowledge could build a Twitter clone in an afternoon, but the challenge is to make it globally and infinitely scalable.

The real challenge is it to get people to use. I believe that there are no insurmountable technical or organizational problems in scaling a messaging service.

Comparing Twitter and S3 though? Twitter literally epitomized site unreliability with its fail whales for so many years before finally figuring out how to do the one single thing they do reliably, viz. shuffling around a bunch of text messages. As far as big tech goes Twitter looks like the least well managed or thought Out tech stack I can see.

To make sure it’s not interpreted that way, I’m not saying a single guy could create Twitter at its scale in a month, but they do basically one thing and have infinite resources. It’s not that hard.

Payment processing is at least as dull as storage. And it should be. Dull and reliable is exactly what I want in anything financial.

The hard part isn't designing and building an object heap, the hard part is building, guiding and managing a team that builds, manages and operates an object heap, at a world wide scale.

What made her so formidable?

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