AWS doesn’t even have a “devops team” nor even any devops job roles. AWS also does not use Terraform (which is what the article says everyone was replaced with) at any significant scale, so this article is similar junk.
This one mentions terraform by name (though that doesn't necessarily imply its in use, though having worked in large companies I would argue that sweeping statements about a popular technology not being used is likely to be wrong)
AWS does not have dedicated devops roles. All AWS SWEs are expected to take oncall shifts and respond to incidents, manage build pipelines, etc rather than having specific devops people to do it for them. The article you linked claiming 40% of them were fired is total junk. You can believe that or not, I don’t care.
The last one is a ProServe role, which is a consulting role that spends their time working in customer environments, which is where they may encounter terraform. It does not mean anything about internal use of terraform.
Again, I’d be wary making sweeping generalisations like that.
I already showed you that AWS has (or hires) DevOps people with publicly available information, maybe the article is incorrect but you’re clearly not better informed, so maybe cut it with the rude commentary.
Within AWS this role falls under the Systems Engineer job family. It is not a devops role, and its involvement in events like today would be the same involvement as every other SWE at Amazon.
Just do a quick google search for that “40% of devops laid off” and you’ll see that it’s actually an old article from months ago that multiple people, including AWS employees, are saying is bullshit and unsourced.
edit: found another source that says this 40% number came from an AWS consultant that worked with customers to help them be better at DevOps, and it was 40% of their specific team that was laid off. Even if it were true, it has nothing to do with the internal operations of AWS services. This is why it’s important to understand the information you’re sharing before making judgements off of it.
Seems wild that you would promote job titles you don’t hire for, makes me think that it’s reasonable for news outlets to refer to those roles in the same way honestly.
You seem to be kind of annoyed that somebody on the internet hasn’t taken your assertion that you just sort of generally Know Better as strongly as you’d like. You could probably put this entire discussion to bed by clarifying your current position at AWS and how your job there gives you direct knowledge of their devops practices.
It makes a direct claim of hundreds of cloud staff being laid off.
You know what though? I’m not wasting my time with you, the fact was that this was all over social media. Then a huge outage- my original comment was factually accurate even if we contend that the article itself was bunk. And AWS clearly hires DevOps staff.
You’ve not even disproved anything you’re just making me play internet fetch. I’m not replying anymore.
> It makes a direct claim of hundreds of cloud staff being laid off.
I don't have any dog in this fight, but I don't see where this article makes your case. From your article:
> We understand around 100 jobs are at stake.
> Sources familiar with AWS operations who requested anonymity told The Register most of the layoffs affected people in marketing and outreach roles, although chatter on sites like Blind suggests folks in frontline support and in other positions may have been affected, too.
Source: Former AWS Professional Services employee.
Notice the job description:
As part of the AWS Managed Operations team, you will play a pivotal role in building and leading operations and development teams dedicated to delivering high-availability AWS services, including EC2, S3, Dynamo, Lambda, and Bedrock, exclusively for EU customers.
They aren’t looking for DevOpe engineers to work alongside the “service teams” - the teams that build and support internal AWS services. They are working with AWS customers who may already be using Terraform. AWS has a large internal consulting division staffed with full time employees. When they work with customers they will use Terraform if needed.
I work for Amazon (AWS for 4 years then “the website” side of the house for the last 3)
The previous commenter is correct, there is no NOC or devops team and I’ve not encountered a Devops job family and I’ve never seen terraform internally.
Within AWS, the service teams that work these outages are the same ones that design the service, fix bugs, deploy the pipelines, be oncall, etc. the roles that fill these teams are pretty much one of three types: nde, sde, sysde. They typically use cdk if they’re doing AWS things, else they’ll use internal tooling.
The job you posted is a customer facing consultant like role - customers use terraform so having a customer facing consultant type that knows how customer-y things work is a good decision.
You could both be right if they are trying to expand terraform use from a beachhead to the entire company. You need to hire people with prior experience for such things.
