Ever wondered how the AWS leviathan develops software?

How does AWS develop software? It is all about small teams, according to a low-key but revealing session at the re:Invent conference under way in Las Vegas. Under the title "Amazon's DevOps culture," Leo Zhadanovsky, who is Chief Technologist, Education, and Alyssa Lee, Customer Success Lead for AI and ML, described what the …

[Tom 38]

I would like to know more about Greg

Where are you Greg?

[yetanotheraoc]

Re: I would like to know more about Greg

Greg spends his time wondering why Amazon's shopping page today can't do things his cgi script could do back in the day.

[xyz]

Woop dee doo

It all sounds wonderful except... Amazon still managed to lose my order last week.

[Zenubi]

More of this sort of thing

Please.

[teebie]

Is this why the UI for configuring aws is so inconsistent?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't have said inconsistent, what's a good word for "sorta all over the place"?

"Scattered", maybe. I dunno.

To be fair, I don't use AWS often enough to have developed finger memory, I suppose; but it seems like every time I need to get into the EC2 dashboard it's a scavenger hunt finding the thing. Then I have to remember which AZ I need to be pointed at, because the ui doesn't always remember my default or something. And finally I can mess around with whatever instance I care about at that moment.

I appreciate EC2 for the ability to run off-prem VM's when I need to, but I don't love needing to.

[yetanotheraoc]

two pizza teams

I hope they are not suggesting two pizzas can feed 6-15 people, because I can eat a large two topping pizza all by myself, as can two-thirds of my siblings.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: two pizza teams

It's a reference to the weekly pay of Amazon's delivery people.

[Michael Hoffmann]

Whatever else...

... I can add about the hell-hole that is working there, most of the article about development is true - specifically about the stringency and automation. I learned a lot there that I still adopt today in that regard.

With one notable exception: the builder tools. Oh by all the demons in all the hells, the builder tools. I kludgier hodge-podge of... Java? Ruby? Some unholy and unnatural marriage of the two? Jaby? Ruva? you have likely never found. My suspicion is that the guy who wrote that 40,000 line Perl script went on to create the Amazon/AWS builder tools. :'(

[Xor007]

Ah, those tools

Don't know when you where there but you are definitely right about the build tools for pushing to production: soul crushing.

[dgappy]

Interesting tone

Feels more like a paid for ad for AWS than the Reg's usual more cynical appraisal. So you do have your favourites eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Serverless" ?

I have to confess, I have never really understood what the cloud peddlers mean by "serverless".

I can't get past the fact that there's *some* kit, somewhere in the vast rows of AWS datacenters, behind everything they do. I get that they don't literally mean "it's clouds all the way down" (though sometimes I wonder if their marketing folks grok that), but my metal-in-the-machine-room mindset doesn't know what they do actually mean.

Cloud product terminology makes my head hurt sometimes. It took a while before I got used to saying "instance" instead of "VM" ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "Serverless" ?

Serverless doesn't mean there are no servers -- it means you don't manage the servers (or the OS). You bring your code, configure what events trigger it, and off you go.