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Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3 (2023)

Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3 (2023)

4 comments

·February 25, 2025
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otterley

If I have learned one thing that makes AWS successful in terms of delivering scalable and reliable services--and that hasn't yet been widely adopted elsewhere--it is captured here:

"The focus on ownership actually helps understand a lot of the organizational structure and engineering approaches that exist within Amazon, and especially in S3. To move fast, to keep a really high bar for quality, teams need to be owners. They need to own the API contracts with other systems their service interacts with, they need to be completely on the hook for durability and performance and availability, and ultimately, they need to step in and fix stuff at three in the morning when an unexpected bug hurts availability. But they also need to be empowered to reflect on that bug fix and improve the system so that it doesn’t happen again. Ownership carries a lot of responsibility, but it also carries a lot of trust – because to let an individual or a team own a service, you have to give them the leeway to make their own decisions about how they are going to deliver it."

chubot

This is what has always been missing at google IMO - there is a launch and promo and move on incentive, which is essentially the opposite of ownership

There was also a related culture of deprecation, which offloads work onto consumers of an API

null

[deleted]

dang

Discussed at the time (of the article):

Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36894932 - July 2023 (160 comments)