A confession that the tools that Amazon was using internally were outdated
Jatin Schlider, an engineer at Amazon, has put together a blog to show how outdated and awful tools used in Amazon's internals.
JS-On Internal Engineering practices at Amazon
Mr. Schlider has been working at Amazon for two years after graduating from university, but at that time the tools used at Amazon were not very good tools.
◆ Deployment tool
The process of deploying developed applications on a server and making them available is called deployment, and engineers usually use some sort of tool to simplify deployment. According to Shridder, Amazon used a proprietary tool called 'Apollo' that is not compatible with auto scaling. When deploying to a different region, it was necessary to open the two tabs and copy the configuration from right to left.
◆ Log
If services are deployed across multiple servers, logs for those services should be centrally manageable. However, Amazon's internal tools do not have such a system, and they connected to each server and checked logs. Also, there is an activity called Move to AWS while Shridder is enrolled, and it is supplemented that it may be an environment where log management tools such as CloudWatch can be used now.
◆ Management of service
Amazon has a mechanism called owner, and each service is managed by the team that became the owner. However, there is no way for the owner to know who is using the service that he / she is managing, and it has been in a state where he does not understand the cooperation between the services well. When she was ordered to update a service, she tried to stop the service once to find out who was using it, but no one complained, and the service remained stopped. That's right.
◆ Container technology
A container is a technology used to reproduce a machine environment using virtualization technology and to operate one program in various places. Container technology was not used in Amazon internal tools, and countless man-hours were wasted.
Mr. Shridder also commented on Amazon that 'we should do experimental things and lead the technology,' criticizing the delay in open source development.
Looking at other companies, Facebook is developing an open source tool for building a Web page called React, and Google has open sourced TensorFlow used for machine learning and Kubernetes, a container deployment tool. I develop. Other companies such as Microsoft, Twitter, LinkedIn, Square, AirBnb, etc. are contributing to open source, but Amazon just sells the product on AWS and says Shrider.
Furthermore, Mr. Shrider criticizes that Amazon is lagging behind in research and development as well as open source. Facebook has developed a new language called Hack to improve PHP, a programming language. Google makes heavy use of Java and C ++, but has developed a new language called Go to provide better services. However, it seems that languages other than Java can hardly be used inside Amazon.
However, comments posted on Hacker News have many reports that the situation surrounding the above-mentioned in-house tools has been significantly improved within the current Amazon.
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in Note, Web Service, Posted by log1d_ts