stuart_marshall
stuart_marshall on Hacker News
If you look at the lists of ranked baby names by year, you'll see a massive drop off of Alexas about when Amazon shipped.
Software and organizations are always much more complicated than you would realize as an outsider.
Most of those 10k employees are probably not software engineers. Businesses have many other functions.
From a software standpoint, any system that support 100M clients with rich functionality is going to be shockingly complex.
Some companies, notably Google and Amazon, have maintenance of customer trust as a core principle. This seems to be working. Generally, people trust a lot of their private data to these companies and the companies do not abuse it.
Microsoft believes in this too, but had to learn the hard way back around 2000 that customer trust matters a lot.
Facebook seems to have had a harder time learning this lesson. Perhaps they've learned it now, but it'll take a while before consumers really believe it.
Yes, every group in Amazon has its own recruiters who largely find candidates independently.
However, Amazon does have a good central database of everybody who is contacted, who last talked with them, what happened with the contact, etc. And they're usually pretty good about having only one group active with a candidate at a time.
Love that this feature finally released.
I was a dev manager on DynamoDB years ago when we first started working on this. I left three years ago and had almost given up hope that this feature would see the light of day.
The great thing about it is that it helps with spiky and sporadic workloads.
In my current work I have a bunch of unit tests that hit a set of dynamodb tables. I have those tables provisioned at a 5 RCU and 5 WCU each. Multiply this by ten tables and I'm paying $25 per month. In the grand scheme of costs, this isn't much, but it's annoying and adds up.
(One can argue that unit tests should be hitting a mock or a dynamodb local. That's true, but you also want some tests that actually hit the service.)
On demand can be great for sporadic tests, for prototypes, for small personal projects, and for just messing around.
There are also spiky non-customer-facing production scenarios that can benefit from On demand.