This looks like a great service - there are some really interesting ideas here. The provisioned throughput is a great idea. It's interesting to see it runs on SSDs as well, I wonder if its storage is log based like LevelDB. The composite hashed indexes are really interesting as well - I guess they partition the index across nodes, and each node maintains a range of the sorted index. It'll be interesting to see how us…
My take on Steve's rant (as an engineer at Amazon) is that a lot of the issues he pointed out are legitimate, but at an entirely different scale than he was pitching them at.
Day to day I work on a product with another couple dozen or so engineers. We build what makes sense for our product, and for the most part we build it in a way that makes sense for us. Sometimes we are under pressure to leverage other parts of the platform, and sometimes that does entail a lot more work. Most of the time, though, it ends up reducing our operational load (because the systems we depend on support products much larger than ours :) and giving us someone we can page when things go pear-shaped.
Amazon isn't the perfect place to work, but it's generally not bad (other than the frugality thing; that sucks as an employee no matter which way you slice it).