Agreed, I doubt Amazon had any evil intentions with this change.
I wonder more if this was a product of Amazon developers using S3 (i.e. dogfooding) and not noticing the cost side effect because I'm assuming they don't get billed?
We're an established team/product, so we have an internal wiki, help/support desk, and use PagerDuty. We just want to shift away from only a few people (basically 2) handling DevOps emergencies and spread the experience over more members of our engineering team.
With the "all on call/no schedule" route, have you ever had a scenario where no one acknowledged an issue?
We have not discussed this point, but I'm assuming it's off the table due to cost. And yes, this is for 24x7 rotations where everyone is in the same timezone...