Completely agree. The AWS team is one of the very few examples of rapid iteration and improvement from a big company.
I'm as interested in the AWS team as I am in any startup that exists today. I'd love to read about the tech challenges/team make up, etc. Is there any good coverage of this?
Yes, would definitely be interesting to find out how they maintain the quality and release so often. Would be a good data point to see if they use any of the agile processes and any tweaks they have done to make it work for them.
If Bezos's personality is decidedly noncorporate, so are some of his ideas about how to run a large organization. One of Bezos's more memorable behind-the-scenes moments came during an off-site retreat, says Risher. "People were saying that groups needed to communicate more. Jeff got up and said, 'No, communication is terrible!' " The pronouncement shocked his managers. But Bezos pursued his idea of a decentralized, disentangled company where small groups can innovate and test their visions independently of everyone else. He came up with the notion of the "two-pizza team": If you can't feed a team with two pizzas, it's too large. That limits a task force to five to seven people, depending on their appetites.
I first tried Rackspace Cloud, who would send me frequent marketing-style e-mails with stock photos of intelligent-looking office employees, ask me to participate in raffles, and other nonsense that I would quickly filter.
I much prefer seeing new feature announcements from AWS in my inbox! (And on HN.)
I use AWS both for work and for personal (love the free tier micro to play around with on my own time) and I am always impressed with how polished new features feel.
I'm as interested in the AWS team as I am in any startup that exists today. I'd love to read about the tech challenges/team make up, etc. Is there any good coverage of this?