When I worked on cloud at MS, it was the same -- although AWS was clearly in the lead, a major concern was that Google's superior engineering would allow them to crush AWS and Azure; "preparing for a knife fight with Amazon, but Google is going to bring a gun to this knife fight"
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But when I looked at execution speed on actual projects (via backchannel communications), AWS was smoking both us and Google. In one case, I heard that they got the idea for a project from our product announcement and they still shipped before we did.
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They weren't moving fast and breaking things -- when I looked at 3rd party measured uptime, AWS was clearly #1 and we were going back and forth with Google for #2. This understates AWS's edge since they had fewer global outages and less flakiness that didn't count as downtime.
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The more I looked into this, the more impressed I was with Amazon engineering. But AFAICT this never translated into any kind of reputational change. I don't think this is unique to Amazon either. When I compare general reputation to what I can observe, they seem uncorrelated.
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BTW, I don't mean this thread as an attack on MS or Google. It's more that if I could take a sabbatical from my job and intern somewhere to learn from them, Amazon would be at the top of my list and I don't think many others would put any company in my top 3 in their top 50.
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I've also never understood Widows snobbery. StackOverflow was running on 11 IIS boxes + 4 MySQL boxes in 2016, could tolerate failing down to 1 IIS box. Meanwhile, some trendy SV companies were serving multiple orders of magnitude less traffic at multiple OoM greater cost.pic.twitter.com/iBNu8yQokW
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PG also says: Python programmers are smarter than Java programers, good hackers prefer Python. Odd, Google was built on Java & C++ (w/some Python). But if you were on the MS stack you wouldn't have to choose between the perf & IDE support of Java and Python expressiveness.pic.twitter.com/i0f0aMr4oy
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Until Kotlin, there wasn't a mainstream non-MS language that had anything close to the same combination of: * Performance * Ease of use / ease of onboarding new devs * IDE suport * General expressiveness (arguably Go, but I would disagree on expressiveness & IDE support)
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Why care about performance? While trendy $1B to $70B SV companies were devoting a ton of time, money, & effort to scaling up a v. low performance stack, SO was humming along with relatively little effort devoted to scaling because they started with a moderate performance stack.
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If you compare the 2013 and 2016 StackOverflow architectures, the changes aren't radical: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2013/11/22/what-it-takes-to-run-stack-overflow/ … https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-architecture-2016-edition/ … Meanwhile, trendy SV companies were and are moving to incredibly complex architectures to scale out despite having much less traffic.
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