THe culture certainly supports it.

Wasn't trying to take anything away, it's just a separate product is all I meant. Their tagline has always kinda been "Run on the same platform as amazon.com!"

My understanding is that AWS was built from the ground up and is not a fork of the actual code that runs Amazon. This is apparent in that Amazon has internal competitors to DynamoDB and SWF. I'm sure there are other examples.

To add to that, many of the older backend systems are still running Oracle, although they are now pushing to migrate to noSQL solutions. Dogfooding is generally encouraged but not required internally.

Bingo, also lots of examples of teams trying to build things for internal Amazon that will then be "easily" externalized as AWS services... and failing.

I've seen that situation exactly.. Large product with SVP support that gets built for AWS, (nearly) launched and then shot down by Jeff himself :)