Collapsing the Stack
Werner Vogels: Yep, the best way to completely automate operations is to have to developers be responsible for running the software they develop. It is painful at times, but also means considerable creativity gets applied to a very important aspect of the software stack. It also brings developers into direct contact with customers and a very effective feedback loop starts. There is no separate operations department at Amazon: you build it; you run it.
Sounds like a very good idea.
Where this gets tricky is with dependences. Trivial, but concrete, example: Werner’s Atom feed contains (in part):
<summary><![CDATA[ … Q&A … ]]></summary>
Over time, I would expect Amazon’s policy to advantage people who tend to shun dependencies (do I really need an RDB here?), complex frameworks (which make your life easier 95% of the time, but a living hell the other 95% of the time), and even those that avoid conveniences like IDEs.