Very unlikely; Amazon's backend is basically Perl talking to an SoA via an internal service definition language. A change to server-side JS would require a re-write of almost everything (which isn't unprecedented; the migration from a single giant C++ binary to the Perl system 10-odd years ago was such a rewrite).
While I agree that it's terribly unlikely, one could argue that having the services backing the frontend fleet written in JavaScript was "powering" Amazon.com via JS. There's no technical limitation on what you can build those services in, so it's theoretically possible.
One could indeed, and again there is some precedent for writing services in "unusual" languages. However, the service ecosystem, tooling and deployment was/is entirely custom; they'd need to add support for JavaScript to an awful lot of internal tools to make it work well. The effort to get Java supported as a first-class development language was pretty substantial, and over the years there a number of internal teams with clever names sprung up to try and change the status quo in one way or another (SVN > Perforce! Ruby > Java!) with varying degrees of success.
So, yeah, no technical limitation, but explaining to Jeff that you've spent a year retooling the build system to support node.js but not actually shipped any features yet might lead to limitations of another sort :-)
> So, yeah, no technical limitation, but explaining to Jeff that you've spent a year retooling the build system to support node.js but not actually shipped any features yet might lead to limitations of another sort :-)
Indeed, and this is why I agree that it's pretty unlikely :).
During my stint at Amazon we barely had time to build the infrastructure we absolutely needed to launch features on the artificial deadlines imposed from somewhere in the stratosphere. How anyone had time to work on paying off technical debt or building new infrastructure is beyond me.
Very unlikely; Amazon's backend is basically Perl talking to an SoA via an internal service definition language. A change to server-side JS would require a re-write of almost everything (which isn't unprecedented; the migration from a single giant C++ binary to the Perl system 10-odd years ago was such a rewrite).