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Comment by koliber | Hacker News Reader

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koliber·

Amazon prides itself on it's amazing software engineering practices.

Why is it that every single input in AWS has some arbitrary character limitations?

Can't do uppercase letters here. No dashes there. Underscores forbidden there.

Even some AWS passwords have forbidden characters in them.

Makes you wonder what is stored as a file on some old NFS volume :).

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> Why is it that every single input in AWS has some arbitrary character limitations?

Because AWS is not one thing.

It's a federation of products built by fabled “two pizza teams” relatively independently for uncoupled velocity, without a heavy dose of "enterprise architecture" imposed on it.

That's the point. It's OK to have independence and local decision making authority. At the same time, some amount of centralized guidance is needed to make the combined product or service feel good.

AWS is a group of largely-independent teams.

It's also very much a "thing". Pretty sure all the AWS teams have the same logo on their t-shirts, get yelled at by the same HR department, and get paid by the same company.

Amazon doesn't even have a QA department, so what's there to be proud of in terms of their software engineering practices? The customers are literally the QA. This is not a hyperbole.

Are you talking about Amazon the store, or AWS?

AWS

Plus arbitrary length limits on strings and various identifiers...

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