After leaving Amazon you really go on to understand how good the internal tools are at Amazon and how they probably have the best tools in the industry.
I had the exact opposite reaction after leaving Amazon. Brazil is a slow, bloated pile of crap that regularly blocked fixes, made it impossible to develop in a non-standard language, and regularly resulted in 100+ dev build blockages due to versioning issues.
Our team was abandoning Apollo for MAWS, so our deployments were bridged between the two, resulting in another twisted pile of incomprehensible script-glue.
Pipelines was ok (!)
Everything on public EC2 for managing deployments (CodeDeploy and CloudFormation in particular) were so broken and bug-ridden and non-performant that we couldn't reliably deploy production code with them.
I prefer open source solutions in almost every way. I actually can't think of a single problem that the Amazon internal stack solves that isn't better solved in the open-source world. Which isn't surprising, given the constraints involved.
Brazil + Apollo + Pipelines. I left (and later boomeranged) and was surprised that the outside world hadn't solved these problems nearly as well. Don't get me wrong, Brazil and Apollo probably are ready for a rethink and rewrite, but they do a great job.
if you went to another bloated enterprise company, that wouldn't be surprising. If you went to a high-profile consulting company and had that experience, I'd be shocked.
Hard to say (especially in as public forum like this).
Brazil's dependency model is, I think, very much worth rethinking. Just try to use it for NodeJS. Apollo is fine but slow and dated and needs love. Pipelines works for specific software models and not others (ever seen a pipeline with 500 envs?). Great design for building custom approval steps though (long ago I wrote a now-popular one).
As a former Googler, I know a lot of Googlers that feel exactly the same way. It would be interesting for someone who has deeply experienced both to weigh in.
Our team was abandoning Apollo for MAWS, so our deployments were bridged between the two, resulting in another twisted pile of incomprehensible script-glue.
Pipelines was ok (!)
Everything on public EC2 for managing deployments (CodeDeploy and CloudFormation in particular) were so broken and bug-ridden and non-performant that we couldn't reliably deploy production code with them.
I prefer open source solutions in almost every way. I actually can't think of a single problem that the Amazon internal stack solves that isn't better solved in the open-source world. Which isn't surprising, given the constraints involved.