It's likely lots of bubble gum and chicken wire. I'm sure in the video ingest and transcode side of things there are some really interesting bits though. When you're owned by Amazon you don't need to optimize too much to achieve web scale... just leverage AWS services. It's not like you're going to get a bill.
> When you're owned by Amazon you don't need to optimize too much to achieve web scale... just leverage AWS services. It's not like you're going to get a bill.
Oh you're be surprised. Divisions get billed constantly for the AWS resources they consume, and this bill gets taken out of their annual budget. From what I hear, this is a common practice in most large organizations.
Also, the AWS services you can access from within Amazon are almost identical to the AWS services you can access as an external customer. It's equally easy/hard for a random company to achieve web scale, compared to Twitch.
Oops, didn't mean to be too too negative.
I say embarrassing in the sense of, I've definitely shoved out awful code because something needed to get out(tm). And with large companies, deadlines that cause that situation are inevitable.
But I also say it like that because, well, I've seen code that causes (objectively easy-to-fix) crashes but still ships because of one reason or another: laziness, politics, inexperience. It's a part of software engineering I'm still trying to accept.
Yep, there are lots of small services that don't seem production ready in the source code. Though admittedly we don't know which of those are deprecated.
As someone who has worked at both large and small companies, you'd probably be disappointed.