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Comment by 0x002A | Hacker News Reader

As Amazon moves from day-1 company as it claimed once, to be the sales company like Oracle focusing on raking money, expect more outages to come, and longer to be resolved.

Amazon is burning and driving away the technical talent and knowledge knowing the vendor lock-in will keep bringing the sweet money. You will see more sales people hoovering around your c-suites and executives, while you will face even worse technical support, that seem not knowing what they are talking about, yet alone to fix the support issue you expect to be fixed easily.

Mark my words, and if you are putting your eggs in one basket, that basket is now too complex and too interdependent, and the people who built and knew those intricacies are driven away with RTOs, move to hubs. Eventually those services; all others (and also aws services themselves) heavily dependent on, might be more fragile than the public knows.

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>You will see more sales people hoovering around your c-suites and executives, while you will face even worse technical support, that seem not knowing what they are talking about, yet alone to fix the support issue you expect to be fixed easily.

WILL see? We've been seeing this since 2019.

it will get worse

Do you have data suggesting AWS outages are more frequent and/or take longer to resolve?

This is a prediction, not a historical pattern to be observed now. Only future data can verify if this prediction was correct or not.

AWS has existed for like 2 decades now, is that not enough evidence for you?

And has substantially changed in management in the last couple years. Have you read my first post?

That is why technical leaders’ role wouldn’t demand they not only gather data, but also report things like accurate operational, alternative, and scenario cost analysis; financial risks; vendor lock-in; etc.

However, as may be apparent just from that small set, it is not exactly something technical people often feel comfortable with doing. It is why at least in some organizations you get the friction of a business type interfacing with technical people in varying ways, but also not really getting along because they don’t understand each other and often there are barriers of openness.

I think business types vs technical types inherently have different perspectives especially for american companies. One has the "get it done at all costs" the other has "this can't be done since impossible/it will break this".

When a company moves from engineering/technical driven to sales/profit/stock price/shareholders satisfaction driven, once it was not possible to cut (technical) corners, now becomes the de facto. If you push the L7s/L8s out of the discussion room, who would definitely stop or veto circular dependencies, and replace with sir-yes-sir people, now you've successfully created short term KPI wins for the lofty chairs but with a burning fuse of catastrophic failures to come.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/aws_outage_amazon_bra... quoting from this

"And so, a quiet suspicion starts to circulate: where have the senior AWS engineers who've been to this dance before gone? And the answer increasingly is that they've left the building — taking decades of hard-won institutional knowledge about how AWS's systems work at scale right along with them."

...

"AWS has given increasing levels of detail, as is their tradition, when outages strike, and as new information comes to light. Reading through it, one really gets the sense that it took them 75 minutes to go from "things are breaking" to "we've narrowed it down to a single service endpoint, but are still researching," which is something of a bitter pill to swallow. To be clear: I've seen zero signs that this stems from a lack of transparency, and every indication that they legitimately did not know what was breaking for a patently absurd length of time."

....

"This is a tipping point moment. Increasingly, it seems that the talent who understood the deep failure modes is gone. The new, leaner, presumably less expensive teams lack the institutional knowledge needed to, if not prevent these outages in the first place, significantly reduce the time to detection and recovery. "

...

"I want to be very clear on one last point. This isn't about the technology being old. It's about the people maintaining it being new. If I had to guess what happens next, the market will forgive AWS this time, but the pattern will continue."

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