I work at AWS. I can tell you surely enough it's not pretty or easy to work with. Design and architecture are great here but implementation of that is pretty crap...
Because business authorised it's use. The final say on using AWS doesn't belong to tech but busines and AWS is very good at the sales game. I went to one of their conferences and it was mostly business people and sales pitches.
Thats too bad, I always imagined the backend was as magical as what AWS users see. I still wish I could have a peek at how S3 works or IAM. Not enough to get a job at AWS - I know they'd fire me the first time I left early for a parent teacher conference or took a sick day, so why put myself in that position.
The only thing magical about AWS' backend is how much manpower they can throw at things.
Amazon doesn't have a good engineering culture. It's all about shipping things as fast as possible. People get promoted an leave for other teams, and the new folk gets burned out due to on-call load while trying to fix crappy software they have inherited.
