Based on my experience, the article contains a lot of misinformation. Some of the statements might have been true at one point in the past, but are now out of date by years, while others have never been true in the time I've been around. Without getting into a point-by-point rebuttal, my reaction to each section/Exhibit is "that's wrong/misleading".
Isn't that a bit disingenuous? Your role at Amazon is nothing like the typical engineer at Amazon. You live in the shiny new world while the majority of engineers are stuck on something that's not too far from the article.
I was an intern at AWS this past summer(and will be returning as a new grad in May) and this article is not accurate based on my experience.
My code (which was part of our team's actual production system, not a toy project) ran on EC2 instances in an autoscaling group. There was no manually provisioning servers.
I worked with a Kinesis Stream and several other resources and there was a way for us to programmatically retrieve the names of the resources. My impression was the system we used to find a resource name works for all AWS resources so I imagine you could get the name of a load balancer this way as well.
Finally, I'll just say my team worked entirely in Python. Maybe that was an exception, but it is certainly sufficient to directly falsify the statement that "internally, at Amazon, you can't even use a language other than Java." (How would the author even know this? Was he in on the S-team meeting where it was declared that all non java users get a pip?)