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Comment by riffraff | Hacker News Reader

I am unaware of AWS modules discontinued by amazon, but it is also true that the oldest services are the most popular (S3, EC2) while some of the most recent ones have a (apparently?) smaller user base (SWF, Kinesis, AppStream).

I think I remember amazon people saying they are actually dogfooding this stuff so it should stay available for a long time anyway, rather than being a random Google Reader.

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There is a strong culture of dog-fooding in Amazon. The advantages to it are quite straight forward :) If you've got a whole bunch of DBA experts already hired, why would you hire additional people to do DBA work for every team, when they could just use RDS? Along with that is the huge added benefit of a direct feedback loop, with consumers and producers able to directly meet and deal with feature requests, problems etc. etc.

Retiring any of the services that have been launched would cause not inconsiderable pain to other teams :)

AWS's practice of charging people seems to make it pretty easy to justify not pulling a Google on users.

AWS definitely dogfoods, to the point where people have to be careful internally to not create circular dependencies (this nearly happened to me once).

I think there's a notion of persistence in AWS' leadership that propagates through the teams. AWS is willing to fight through the early painful years for products to see them arrive at the stage that EC2/S3 have attained.

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