Hi! I’m a senior engineer at Amazon. Throwaway account but I’ll try to respond to questions if anyone cares to ask.
Yeah we use services heavily, but there’s plenty of teams dumping data to S3 or using a data lake.
There’s also the “we need to do this but management doesn’t see value so let’s dump it on the intern or SDE 1, who we won’t really mentor or guide and then blame, forcing them to switch teams as soon as they can.”
If you work at another company and think we have our stuff figured out at Amazon, we really don’t. We have brilliant people, many of who are straight up assholes who will throw you under the bus. We have people who are kind and will help you gain all kinds of engineering skills. We also have people who are scum of the Earth shit people who work at Amazon because I don’t think any other sane company or workplace would tolerate them. We have extremes on the garbage people end of the spectrum, unfortunately.
Sorry long rant - point being - it’s good to learn how we do things. The internal email on services is pretty unique. I learned about it when I was an SDE 1 back in the day. But - don’t take it as gospel. It doesn’t mean you need to build services.
I can think of any number of examples where we follow anti patterns because no one gives a shit about the pattern, whether it’s a service, a bucket, a queue, or a file attached to the system used for scrum tasks, or shit passed over email... we care about value at the end of the day. If you don’t provide sufficient value at Amazons bar, they have no problem tossing you out the window.
Yeah we use services heavily, but there’s plenty of teams dumping data to S3 or using a data lake.
There’s also the “we need to do this but management doesn’t see value so let’s dump it on the intern or SDE 1, who we won’t really mentor or guide and then blame, forcing them to switch teams as soon as they can.”
If you work at another company and think we have our stuff figured out at Amazon, we really don’t. We have brilliant people, many of who are straight up assholes who will throw you under the bus. We have people who are kind and will help you gain all kinds of engineering skills. We also have people who are scum of the Earth shit people who work at Amazon because I don’t think any other sane company or workplace would tolerate them. We have extremes on the garbage people end of the spectrum, unfortunately.
Sorry long rant - point being - it’s good to learn how we do things. The internal email on services is pretty unique. I learned about it when I was an SDE 1 back in the day. But - don’t take it as gospel. It doesn’t mean you need to build services.
I can think of any number of examples where we follow anti patterns because no one gives a shit about the pattern, whether it’s a service, a bucket, a queue, or a file attached to the system used for scrum tasks, or shit passed over email... we care about value at the end of the day. If you don’t provide sufficient value at Amazons bar, they have no problem tossing you out the window.