How many totally-different-yet-common sets of requirements are there for user uploads or task processing do you think there are that necessitate the ultimate flexibility and complexity? I suspect vendor lock-in is a more likely cause of the complexity.
> I suspect vendor lock-in is a more likely cause of the complexity.
I think people give large organizations credit for being mustache twirlingly evil when the collective consciousness that makes up AWS is simply not smart enough to be this evil. If AWS had the coordination to do this the product would be better.
It's much more likely that the complexity is the result of a huge number of teams working independently and integration complexity being 2^n. Like AWS had one good transformative idea to make coordination easier which is to be API first but that only forces superficial consistency.
AWS and Amazon for that matter didn't just happen. There absolutely is a lot of enterprise architecture and strategy built into them with the goal of capturing markets and extracting rent. Corporations exist for the exact reason that this is possible.
This seems seriously naive.. its not mustache twirling evil, it is business and its a big part of it to build moats and prevent yourself from unintentionally filling it in. Businesses absolutely will maintain worse functionality if improving it can aid a competitor.
