I think it would have been more effective if he just 'called in sick' (if that was possible for him) or staged an extended walkout of engineers. I have all my infrastructure on AWS and the prospect that it could all come to a halt immediately and unexpectedly makes me think of other providers or at least spreading my workoad to azure, google, etc.. and that should get Amazon's attention.
I really don't think a single top level engineer voting with his feet will have any measurable impact technically or financially on amazon.
I agree.. it's the message that there is another 'point of failure' that no one has paid much attention to.
If you want Amazon/AWS to change it's ways, then you need to get the attention of CIO's.
And I think regular walkouts of 100 engineers who monitor the network is going to do a better job of getting it than a single architect leaving, no matter how much of a star he was.
I really don't think a single top level engineer voting with his feet will have any measurable impact technically or financially on amazon.