Completely agree. The AWS team is one of the very few examples of rapid iteration and improvement from a big company.

I'm as interested in the AWS team as I am in any startup that exists today. I'd love to read about the tech challenges/team make up, etc. Is there any good coverage of this?

Yes, would definitely be interesting to find out how they maintain the quality and release so often. Would be a good data point to see if they use any of the agile processes and any tweaks they have done to make it work for them.

It's a bit old, but still relevant: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/85/bezos_2.html

If Bezos's personality is decidedly noncorporate, so are some of his ideas about how to run a large organization. One of Bezos's more memorable behind-the-scenes moments came during an off-site retreat, says Risher. "People were saying that groups needed to communicate more. Jeff got up and said, 'No, communication is terrible!' " The pronouncement shocked his managers. But Bezos pursued his idea of a decentralized, disentangled company where small groups can innovate and test their visions independently of everyone else. He came up with the notion of the "two-pizza team": If you can't feed a team with two pizzas, it's too large. That limits a task force to five to seven people, depending on their appetites.

Seconded.

I first tried Rackspace Cloud, who would send me frequent marketing-style e-mails with stock photos of intelligent-looking office employees, ask me to participate in raffles, and other nonsense that I would quickly filter.

I much prefer seeing new feature announcements from AWS in my inbox! (And on HN.)

I use AWS both for work and for personal (love the free tier micro to play around with on my own time) and I am always impressed with how polished new features feel.