There can also be business opportunities offered exclusively to partners. My company wants more people to become AWS Practitioners for this reason. I believe Amazon refers work to its partners, although I'm not clear on the details.
I really do think this dogfooding is why AWS is successful. Amazon's businesses run a lot of their workloads on AWS. Amazon is AWS's largest customer. So AWS has the benefit of having thousands of heavy use customers internally to discover bugs and edge cases and provide feedback.
For example, I contributed a fix to AWS documentation as a SDE in the Kindle org. This is the kind of improvements you get with dogfooding.
"Today Amazon introduces the AWS Partnered Software Supplier Programm. Selected companies are invited to offer their products as deeply integrated AWS services.
The first announced Parter are: Not-at-all-amazon-for-hashicorp inc, Not-at-all-amazon-for-mariadb inc."
Don't forget that AWS came out of Amazon's need for infrastructure. Amazon is dogfooding with AWS, and that's one of the reasons AWS remains in the lead when it comes to cloud compute platforms. They keep launching new, useful services, that come out of real business use cases.
Yes, of course they do. There was a post on here about a year ago from someone in the "Amazon profitability team" that involved digging through customers AWS instances to see what they could learn or duplicate for Amazon.
About 5 years back they were going through a spell of getting lots of engineers from AWS to join them, offering way more than Amazon was. Some of the smartest and most capable systems engineers I know headed in that direction.
Is there any evidence of this? I have to admit, the amount of data Amazon would have about the intimate inner workings of companies using AWS is terrifying.
I don't understand where Amazon is in this game. They are the biggest cloud provider. Azure is offering first class pretrained ml model hosting (content moderation, OCR, OpenAI, etc.).
Google has vector search SCANN library and hosted vector db offerings.
Yeah, Amazon's profits come from AWS. The cash flow to enable stuff like AWS comes from its retail business. That combination is quite ingenious if you ask me.
Hmm, I thought that Amazon was famous for how they standardized their cross-company software? (With AWS as a side effect.)
Or is this not the case anymore?
Amazon has continued to iterate on AWS and execute brilliantly. They're making Google look shabby, and I'd love to know more about how their internal processes differ.
But Amazon is a member of the OSS community, and AWS relies heavily on developers, many of whom care a great deal about the spirit of OSS and being a good and responsible member of the community.
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