Amazon makes reliability a priority-do you?

Amazon makes reliability a priority-do you?

May 23, 2024

Are you making really reliability a priority? Or are you just giving it lip service?

"At Amazon, I was part of the retail website. Outages were lost money, lost money was bad.

So Amazon cared deeply about this.

That was part of it. The other part was it was part of the engineering culture.

When I arrived, one of the things I was told was, we expect you to write high quality, performant, efficient, available code. It's just everybody.

And so yes, solve the business problem, but also apply good engineering principles. And it showed up, it showed up when a principal reviewed your code, it showed up when you discussed it in an outage, it showed up throughout the process.

And so it wasn't lip service. It was something that time was invested in."
—Kolton Andrus, Gremlin CTO