My word. I'm sort of gob smacked this article exists. I know there are nuances in the article, but my first impression was it's saying "we went back to basics and stopped using needless expensive AWS stuff that caused us to completely over architect our application and the results were much better". Which is good lesson, and a good story, but there's a kind of irony it's come from an internal Amazon team. As another…
As an exaws senior dude we never looked at our service stack as a sell at any cost, but as a continuum of service offerings that could be assembled to be more cost optimal at higher operational burden to (mostly) ops free at a higher premium. The goal was to provide a lego kit of power tools and disappear from view tools. At least in my org we never tried to upsell or convince customers of architectures that accreted revenues at their expense, we tried to honestly assess their sophistication and desire for ops burden and complexity vs cost savings by building it themselves with the lower level kit. By our measure using aws brought us business, and we were generally more motivated by customer obsession over soaking them. I know Andy definitely had that view and drilled it into our collective heads. In many ways as an engineering minded person I appreciated the sentiment as I enjoy solving problems more than screwing people out of their money for sport.