tacozilla

Eh, this isn't accurate. Both Redshift and Aurora/RDS are used heavily by a lot of teams internally. If you're talking specifically about the primary data store for live applications, NoSQL was definitely recommended/pushed much harder than SQL, but it by no means required CEO approval to not use DDB

Edit: It's possible you're limiting your statement specifically to AWS teams, which would make it more accurate, but I read the use of "Amazon" in the quote you were replying to as including things like retail as well, etc.

While I can understand the cynicism, the real answer is a lot closer to something much more boring, which is most people just don't care about the actual numbers, and if they were to release them, while interesting to a small few, generally no one would actually care.

There's also a common misnomer that Amazon.com is somehow just this one giant app running on a set of servers, which isn't remotely how it's actually deployed, and that's before we spend time arguing whether a team's instances even count as "primary e-commerce front-end stack" or not. :P

Amazon doesn't really have a "primary e-commerce front-end stack" in any concrete sense. They have hundreds/thousands of teams that deploy bits and pieces to a massive pipeline that ultimately makes up what you see on Amazon.com, but each team can have their own infrastructure backing things. Some teams might run everything off a dozen low-end EC2 instances while another sibling team has 3k+ instances; it's really all over the place, and that's ignoring specific events like Black Friday or Prime Day, etc. where teams need to prescale things in advance.

Source: Worked at Amazon/AWS for almost a decade.

The purpose of language is to communicate, and audiodude did that quite effectively given the fact I chuckled when I read their comment, because I knew exactly what they meant. A "rolling sprint" might be an oxymoron, but it certainly isn't conceptually void. It quite literally does have meaning considering I and many others clearly understood the point he was making through his personal anecdote.