I've been involved with some new service launches at AWS, and it's a strict requirement that everything goes through some rigorous operational and security reviews that cover exactly these issues before the service can be launched as GA. Feature-wise people might consider them "alpha", but when it comes to the resilience and security of the launched features, they are held to much higher standards than what is being described in this post-mortem.

Your operational reviews must be lacking at AWS then (surprise surprise) then because there are so many instances where something will be released in alpha yet the documentation will still be outdated, stale and incorrect LOL.

I think you misunderstand what's being talked about in this thread. "Operations" in this context has nothing to do with external-facing documentation, and instead refers to the resilience of the service and ensuring it doesn't for example, stop working when a single data center experiences a power outage.

"It stopped working because you did XYZ which you shouldn't have done despite it not being documented as something you shouldn't do" isn't different to a customer than a data center going down. For example, I'm sure the EKS UI was really resilient which meant little when random nodes dropped from a cluster due to the utter crap code in the official CNI network driver. My point wasn't that every cloud provider released alpha level software by the same definition but that by a customer's definition they all released alpha level software and label it GA.

> This has been my experience with AWS and GCP as well. Assume anything that's under 3 years old is not really GA quality no matter what they say publicly.

GCP run multi-year betas of services and features, so I'm doubtful there were still things not ironed out for GA. Do you have some examples?