[yazaddaruvala]

Context: I worked at Amazon Retail for 10 years.

Amazon Retail and AWS are the same legal entity for stocks, but other than that they might as well be separate companies.

Retail uses AWS with all the same APIs and quirks as any other company. The only thing different is the negotiation on price (which many large companies also do).

Meanwhile, AWS is apathetic towards feature requests from Retail, and especially operational support for Retail.

In many ways Retail would be better off if it was a separate company and could threaten AWS with a multi-cloud diversification play.

[datadeft]

GECKO all the way. :) I think AWS gave a reasonable price to Retail. The migration caused the biggest outage of the website but at the end there was some pretty nice cost saving on the YOY infra cost.

[dbish]

I worked on both sides. I mostly agree except there are cases of important projects including AWS (like some of the ML work), also the whole aws usage discount/pricing thing is pretty huge and clearly the value in being within the same company. Retail would have a pretty hard time existing nowadays if they weren’t connect to aws imho.