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Comment by golergka | Hacker News Reader

> Amazon had to build their own technology infrastructure. The financial genius of turning this infrastructure into an external product (AWS) has been well-covered

Wasn't the story about AWS wildly discredited? As in AWS was built not from sractch as a product and was NOT using any infrastructure that was used to run Amazon, and only later adopted by Amazon itself.

Why people still keep repeating that story?

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Yes that’s been discredited repeatedly by Amazon executives. Stories pop up all of the time from Amazon where they talk about moving part of thier infrastructure to AWS - including the migration from Oracle to AWS native solutions.

I don’t know the origin story, but that doesn’t discredit anything. Lots of Amazon teams predate AWS, and so does some of their technology. You wouldn’t make a new service and then drop absolutely everything across a huge company to force migration to it. Teams at Amazon have a lot of flexibility in how they build.

Yes, Amazon is trying to move off of Oracle but they still use a lot of them [0]. Also, most of their retail stack runs outside of AWS which is why they could not scale up during prime day because they completely depended on their non-AWS nosql database sable [1].

[0]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-salesforce-would-love-t...

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/19/amazon-internal-documents-wh...

I have no idea what the actual story was, but I would imagine it can be both true and not true in the way you’re imagining.

Say you really need new simple scalable storage because X part of your stack has bottlenecks. You spin up a team to work on it, and that team immediately has ambitions of making it big and sharing their service with the entire world. Now... which narrative is true? Yes, it was spun up to help Amazon. Yes, it was built from scratch as a product. Those don’t sound exclusive to me.

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