Amazon: Constantly Recreating the Wheel
1st hand account how Amazon's two-pizza team model fuels innovation but at the cost of inefficiencies.
Traditional large enterprise IT dogma dictates that you centralize IT services. There are several benefits to centralizing IT services, including cost reduction, compliance, security, and reduced talent resources. However, you sacrifice agility. The friction of centralized IT results in the adoption of public cloud resources by the line of business. It's a repeating cycle. I've often wondered what a large, distributed IT organization looks like.
Bed Adam, a UX designer that worked for Amazon for 10-months, provided some fantastic insight into how Amazon scales its governance to deliver service after service. It's the insider's view of the two-pizza team governance model.
TL;DR – Amazon seems to sacrifice many advantages of a centralized command and control model to gain agility. Recreating the wheel isn't frowned on. However, it doesn't come without disadvantages. Ben notes that many of the tools Amazon creates internally aren't nearly as good as something he could buy off the shelf. However, you can't deny the results shown in Amazon's overall market success.