Do you ever wonder why the Amazon.com website is always "up" and ready to take your order while other systems like UW's Quest frequently go "down" on weekends and holidays? Yes, one reason is that we at Amazon write much better software than the rest of the world. Another reason is, as I mentioned in above linked post, that when Amazon.com is down, we cannot take orders and the company loses money. FURTHERMORE the employees of the company are accountable to the shareholders of the company who don't like losing money. Now at UW when Quest is down it is only lowly students who are inconvienienced and NOBODY is accountable to students (heaven forbid). Anyway, those are good reasons, but the real underlying root reason is that Amazon always has people on-call to fix production problems as they happen. This past week and weekend one of those people was me.

Being "on-call" means you must carry a pager at all times and respond to pages (at any hour of the day or night) for issues of a certain severity with your group's production systems. I ordered my pager a few weeks ago and it hasn't been easy to fit it into my limited remaining pocket real-estate. Phone, ipod, keys, wallet, and now pager.

Now fitting the pager into your life is another issue. This implies making a few changes for the period you are on call. I think it's pretty clear you can't stray too far from a computer or phone line while on call. So no back-country hiking this weekend. Nobody really mentions this one but, I don't think you can stray too far from clear headedness either. I didn't stop going out this week, but have avoided consuming more than one drink each time.

It was a bit scary to go on call for the first time, but the first time I got paged I remember feeling more proud than scared that somebody somewhere trusted me with the care and feeding of all of Amazon Web Services. Of course these dramatic emotions soon wore off but I'll try to remember them. P.S. I think it should be pretty clear that is my personal blog posting and not some kind of official Amazon.com statement.