As bad as this article makes AWS sound, it's actually the reason you should go with AWS over say Azure or GCP; when AWS goes down, its owners actually feel the pain with you, Microsoft and Google run their own stuff elsewhere...
That is simply not true.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-moves-closer-to-runn...
Source: used to work as a SWE on a flagship Azure service
so it's even more embarrassing how terrible the software is.
trolling aside - if this is true, the state of e.g: MS Teams is a travesty. Implementation of replies to messages implemented in 2021!? So many bugs, etc. it seriously damages productivity. And don't get me started on sharepoint.
I have a running list of teams bugs/flaws/inferiorities, it's currently about 30 items, will probably publish it sometime soon
Office 365, Teams, Dynamics, xcloud, xbox live - they all run on Azure.
I'm sure that's changing with time.
YouTube also has its own infrastructure independent of GCP and the rest of Google
I'm pretty sure YouTube hasn't had their own infra in quite a while. When I was there ~8 years ago I think it was all integrated already. Certainly database, video processing, storage, CDN were all on core Google infra, and I'm sure the frontends were too though I don't remember looking into that explicitly.
Doing something on top of GCP rather than the normal way at Google was a huge pain. Borg tutorials and documentation were just far superior, I could get a thing running on borg in an hour from not knowing anything about borg, I spent a week trying to get something running internally on GCP but still couldn't get it right (our team wanted to see if we could run things on GCP so I was tasked with testing it, I couldn't find anyone who knew how to do it so we just gave up after I didn't make any real progress). That was the worst documented thing I've ever worked with. And even worse the internal GCP pages were probably running in california and probably weren't tested from Europe, so the page took like 2 seconds between mouse click and it responded to anything.
That was years ago though and I no longer work there, but at least back then the work to make using GCP internally seamless wasn't done. Maybe it is simpler if you run everything in it and don't need it play well with borg, but there is a reason why it isn't popular internally. And likely you wont find many engineers who left Google who recommend you will use it, since they probably didn't test it and if they did it probably was a bad experience (unless they worked on GCP).
Neither was AWS.
Where on Earth did you learn that?
Actually, it's a bit more than that. Some half-decade ago, Google Cloud got stung by a coordinated attack over the holidays where attackers used stolen credit cards to build a net of GCE instances and do an attack on Tor via endpoint control. Cited by SRE in the postmortem was the relative immaturity of the cloud monitoring, logging, and "break glass" tools that SREs were accustom to in Borg... Essentially, Cloud didn't have the maturity of framework that Borg did and they felt the extra layer of abstraction complicated understanding and stopping the abuse of the service.
This report had a chilling effect internally. Whereas management had previously been encouraging people to migrate to Cloud as quickly as possible, after this incident software engineering teams and the SREs that supported them were able to push back with "Can we trust it to be as maintainable as what we already have?" and put cloud on the defensive to prove that hypothesis.
1. Scale is hard and downtime is hard, HNers either recognize the struggle or appreciate their lack of experience. When AWS fails many armchair architects come out to suggest solutions but many more techies just sympathize with the Amazonians.
2. Technically, Amazon has built something impressive. It might not be what you want, or what others have, but AWS is impressive in scale and scope and even reliability. Many people share credit where due.
3. One can criticize the treatment of warehouse and delivery workers that Amazon is known for, but this has little baring on the tech workers there nor AWS generally. So AWS stories tend to be free from the social critique the company as a whole receives.