Hear, hear! Posted it as I've been raving about ion (particularly s-exp support) to non-amazonians, but credit goes all to them.

It's particularly interesting to see the fixes and improvements from the actual open source cleanup effort getting to (many) Internal production services.

I am curious why you "wouldn't have imagined this possible", is the reason technical or political?

Political.

Amazon doesn't open source things, as a general rule. It can be done but it is a lot of jumping through hoops and they generally need good reasons to do it (as opposed to a lack of good reasons not to).

I was there at the beginning of Ion back in my Amazon days. We may well use it in my current job, too!