53 karma · joined April 27, 2011
Of course the 5/15/40/40 model only applies to your signing; all further yearly stock grants are over the next 2 years from grant time.
Disclosure, work for AWS.
[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/sto...
Amazon generally has a pretty strong remote work culture - I can even get my ipad onto the VPN and SSH around to get my work done.
In the past couple of months this was fixed by the creation of a new role called 'Systems Development Engineer'.
The best I could say was that it was a way for lots of applications writing their own complex datastores (like outlook) to share an OS-level platform so that it could be exposed to other applications with a unified API. It was way more a developer tool than a user-facing feature, but that's not how it was marketed.
Direct device->AWS use can make a lot of scaling issues very simple without needing a middleman service on every request. However this does not obviate the need for a federation brokering-type service that auths the device, calls AWS to get a time-limited token with permissions scoped just so, and hands that back to the client.
AWS provides Amazon/Google/FB web identity federation for just this use case: http://aws.amazon.com/iam/details/manage-federation/.
As I said above - the terminology can get hairy pretty fast. It's valuable to take stock of what you really need persisted, and what use can be made of 'scratch disks'. Local ephemerals are fast and cheap (included in the price of any instance). They come with the operational overhead of needing to rsync data off of them yourself if you want to retire that instance however.