One interesting tidbit is that during the period this author writes about, AWS had a roughly 4-day outage (impacted at least EC2, EBS, and RDS, iirc), caused by EBS, that really shook folks' confidence in AWS.
It resulted in a reorg and much deeper investment in EBS as a standalone service.
It also happened around the time Apple was becoming a customer, and AWS in general was going through hockey-stick growth thanks to startup adoption (Netflix, Zynga, Dropbox, etc).
It's fun to read about these technical and operational bits, but technical innovation in production is messy, and happens against a backdrop of Real Business Needs.
It was a good year after that incident. We focused on stability and driving down issues. We turned around a lot of development idea too. However, the wheel turns and we were back on feature development. I’ll always remember that year as having the fewest escalations during my entire time there.
One interesting tidbit is that during the period this author writes about, AWS had a roughly 4-day outage (impacted at least EC2, EBS, and RDS, iirc), caused by EBS, that really shook folks' confidence in AWS.
It resulted in a reorg and much deeper investment in EBS as a standalone service.
It also happened around the time Apple was becoming a customer, and AWS in general was going through hockey-stick growth thanks to startup adoption (Netflix, Zynga, Dropbox, etc).
It's fun to read about these technical and operational bits, but technical innovation in production is messy, and happens against a backdrop of Real Business Needs.
I wish more of THOSE stories were told as well.