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What I understood is that AWS is more than dogfooding. It is something Amazon first built for themselves, to give more independence to individual teams. And as they noticed it worked well, they realized that they could turn it into a product.

For what I understand as an outsider, Google is much more monolithic, having a platform where each team can do their things independently is not really their culture, so if they build one, it is only for their customers, because they don't work like this internally. Whereas for Amazon, an AWS customer is not that different from one of their own teams.



That’s mostly a marketing myth on the AWS side. As recently as three or four years ago there were _new_ initiatives being built in the legacy “corp” fabric; and even today Amazon has internal tooling that makes use of Native AWS quite different than it is for external customers; particularly around authn/authz.

And that doesn’t even mention the comic “Moving to AWS” platform that technically consumed AWS resources, but was a wholly different developer experience to native.


Now building on AWS inside is heavily emphasized, but just a few years ago most services were built with internal systems that are very different. Some solutions (multi account/cellular architecture for example) seemed to come from dog fooding heavily, but supporting services (like account SSO for handling many accounts) are still very different from the publicly available equivalents.


As someone who worked at AWS it’s ironic how hard they dog food cellular architecture but when it comes to customers, all the offerings and docs are terrible, with the only information in obscure Re:Invent talks or blog posts.

I now work for a large customer and you would be shocked at the household names that basically put all their infrastructure in a single Account and Region. Or they have multi region but it’s basically an afterthought and wouldn’t serve any purpose in a disaster.


Catfooding




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