Can confirm, about 10 years ago, the company I worked for migrated to AWS, and I managed the transition. We planned everything meticulously so that there would be no downtime, and used it as excuse to fix a lot of tech debt. No one was supposed to even notice the cutover, and when we did it, I expected the only feedback to be that things seemed faster and were working as expected. A few hours later, we get a complaint from an Account Manager for Walmart that they can’t access the platform at all. There was a lot of confusion and back and forth, turns out their IT department had an allow list or something in the corporate DNS to not resolve to AWS owned IPs unless approved. We eventually got them to add our domain to their allowlist, but it seemed insane that they would spend the effort to implement and maintain that level of control.
Totally, I understand that, but seemed to be an extreme measure they are inflicting on their employees that doesn’t really change anything. It’d be like if ExxonMobil didn’t allow their employees with company cars to fill up at a Chevron station.
It’d be like if ExxonMobil didn’t allow their employees with company cars to fill up at a Chevron station.
That is likely very much the case. When you drive a company vehicle, you have a fuel card for fill-ups that is for a particular chain and doesn’t work anywhere else.
Yeah I don’t think this is the best analogy, but the point being is brand loyalty can only go so far. Like if you’re going to run out of gas in the next 20 miles and there isn’t an Exxon station within 100 miles, do you just pass all other gas stations and have your employees break down on the side of the road?
I just can’t imagine any actual competitors to AWS would impose such restrictions on their employees that put them in a worse position to do their jobs, so it’s a bit silly that it’s coming from Walmart, when they don’t compete in that space.
Can confirm, about 10 years ago, the company I worked for migrated to AWS, and I managed the transition. We planned everything meticulously so that there would be no downtime, and used it as excuse to fix a lot of tech debt. No one was supposed to even notice the cutover, and when we did it, I expected the only feedback to be that things seemed faster and were working as expected. A few hours later, we get a complaint from an Account Manager for Walmart that they can’t access the platform at all. There was a lot of confusion and back and forth, turns out their IT department had an allow list or something in the corporate DNS to not resolve to AWS owned IPs unless approved. We eventually got them to add our domain to their allowlist, but it seemed insane that they would spend the effort to implement and maintain that level of control.
Amazon and walmart are competitors
Totally, I understand that, but seemed to be an extreme measure they are inflicting on their employees that doesn’t really change anything. It’d be like if ExxonMobil didn’t allow their employees with company cars to fill up at a Chevron station.
That is likely very much the case. When you drive a company vehicle, you have a fuel card for fill-ups that is for a particular chain and doesn’t work anywhere else.
Yeah I don’t think this is the best analogy, but the point being is brand loyalty can only go so far. Like if you’re going to run out of gas in the next 20 miles and there isn’t an Exxon station within 100 miles, do you just pass all other gas stations and have your employees break down on the side of the road?
I just can’t imagine any actual competitors to AWS would impose such restrictions on their employees that put them in a worse position to do their jobs, so it’s a bit silly that it’s coming from Walmart, when they don’t compete in that space.