After years of getting a free ride from open source projects, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is developing its own obsession with contributing. Service teams at AWS seem to be getting the message that to deliver on “Customer Obsession,” Amazon’s foremost leadership principle, they really need to be obsessed with open source contributions too. AWS’ number 2 leadership principle has led some AWS service teams to assume the only way to truly care for customers was to own all aspects of the experience. This made it difficult to engage open source communities because it seemed to imply Amazon would be at the mercy of the community to fix bugs, etc. Some AWS service teams were reluctant to contribute lest they reveal too much about how their systems run or enable competitors with bug fixes or features that differentiated Amazon’s own services. But, thats changing now.
