The perspectives of disgruntled employees have been known to be worse than reality, on occasion. Not definitively saying that's the case here, just saying.

I work at Amazon - a lot of teams are like this. They're stuck managing a woefully broken product and spend all of their time propping up the beast, leaving no capacity left for meaningful fixes (in these cases, meaningful fixes are always gigantic engineering projects).

The team develops a reputation internally for being glorified firefighting, and have trouble recruiting. More senior engineers eventually flee (having, well, choice in the matter) leaving a team heavy with junior talent with no seasoned gurus leading the way.

The company is also growing at ludicrous speed, and hiring is difficult. When the product is in such a painful state, attrition from the team is high, and with slow hiring you are barely countering attrition (exacerbating the junior talent problem), and not even close to growing the team to be in a position to take care of the problem for good.

I suspect this is an industry-wide problem though, and is hardly unique to this place.

This is quite disturbing to read about the place that tons of companies rely on to host their apps. As EC2 (and friends) grows, it's growing undoubtedly more complex. Combine that with many of the original/senior devs leaving to greener pastures and seems like as more time passes it becomes more risky to host with Amazon. Doesn't really inspire confidence ...

This is very accurate of many teams within Amazon. Also, I don't know the exact story of what is happening with EBS now, but I have heard an increasing number of horror stories about EBS.

I wonder if it's time for AWS to open a development office in a more startup-oriented city (i.e. SF). It might help them attract and retain more talent.

A.) Amazon isn't a startup. B.) A lot of Bay Area companies (Zynga, Facebook, Salesforce) are opening Seattle offices to take advantage of the Amazon and Microsoft talent pools. C.) They already have a Bay Area office. http://public.a2z.com/index.html I believe some core SimpleDB guys (Jim Larson) were based out of there.

As are often the perspectives of folks from another team, or trolls posing as employees. Definitely a grain of salt needed.

Even if true, I don't think that comment is fair to the EBS team. It seems a likely reason for that behaviour is they don't have enough resource to work on and test (presumably) large changes to fix the underlying issue while also fixing the tickets which crop up. The tone of the comment seems to imply they're foolishly overlooking the obvious solution.

This is totally true, but at the same time, given the success and scale of AWS, it's insane that they would not have the resources they need.

Word in the industry is that AWS is insanely profitable, so they've got not problem finding the money to hire the help.

My gripe with EBS is that hiccups in EBS cause my Linux instances to "lock up", consume 100% CPU and become unresponsive. AMZN is providing their own Linux distribution and drivers for the EBS devices so they can also attack this problem by patching the Linux kernel.

If you switch to their distribution, do you get any benefit now?

Compatibility with the platform is excellent and it's comfortable for anyone who's familiar with Red Hat or Fedora.

I'd compile my own web server stack, but it's as good a foundation to build on as any Linux distribution.

The hiring market is very competitive right now. It is hard for Amazon (or anyone) to hire good engineers. I think this is exacerbated by Amazon's lack of perks. My opinion is that if Amazon wants to hire the best of the best to work on AWS products they need to stop being so cheap ("frugal") and match the perks (and pay) other software companies offer.

This comment does not seem legitimate. There's nothing in it that would imply special knowledge of AWS or EBS.

Yeah, I call BS on this one. Amazon AWS is for certain use cases. It has never been a platform for all solutions. In fact, it has mostly been a platform for people to craft their own solutions. AWS is not a web hosting platform. If you want a web hosting platform, you create one the best you can from the tools available. This is the sort of response I would expect from an employee of AWS, not the one I saw in those comments. That or maybe the comment was from a customer service guy who isn't a developer.

I'm surprised Reddit ever though AWS would be a good platform to host on. You don't bitch about it, you create the best system you can and if something doesn't work, then you need to do more work. If you don't want to put in the work, then AWS is wrong for you. You don't see Heroku bitching about AWS, rather they made the thing work for them with great engineers.