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Comment by ajkjk | Hacker News Reader

> I can’t think of a single internal tool at Amazon that is better than a commercial counterpart.

I haven't worked at Amazon in 6 years, but when I was last there, these tools were leaps-and-bounds above publicly-available equivalents:

* Pipelines (CI/CD tool. Still better than all alternatives IMO, including the AWS offering for some reason)

* Igraph (Amazingly good, wipes the floor with Grafana which I have used since)

* TT (ticket tracker)

* SIM? the new issue-management system they added to replace Jira. Soooo much better than Jira. But it was pretty new when I left so I don't know what it has become.

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The first time I did a CR on multiple packages at once...that's good shit.

Ah damn also forgot CRUX. Anyone know tools out there that would allow for review across multiple repos/packages?

Jira is bad, but SIM is horrendous. SIM makes Jira look good.

tbh it had just rolled out when I left and I was only giving my initial impression. I don't know what it's like to use long-term.

Although I _hate_ Jira so maybe I'm biased also.

Agreed with everything above, with the addition of brazil. It was pretty fantastic to work with

Yeah, I was pretty surprised to read this complaint, but I would say iGraph is actually the weakest of the bunch. Logging and metrics tools at Amazon leave a lot to be desired. They get the job done, but definitely not best in class.

Well, the author sounds like they were mostly a designer, so maybe they didn't work with most of these.

Incidentally, when I moved to Google after a decade at Amazon, one of the few tools that I missed was iGraph.

I see the value in a lot of these, but I also have to say one common thread across almost all tooling is bad interfaces clearly designed by backend/generalist engineers doing their own ad-hoc form of design. Having worked with an org that transitioned from bitbucket -> gitlab I also found the development/issues at Amazon to have some big headscratchers on missing features like crux diffs following some unintuitive ruleset, and countless smaller inconveniences.

Interesting - I (Amazon employee) have a buddy at Grafana who brags about it all the time. I've tinkered with it, and found it slightly more functional than iGraph, but a lot prettier. What do you think iGraph does better?

+1 on Pipelines being amazing. A lot of people tell me Jira is better than SIM - haven't had a chance to use the former.

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