© Photo by Matt McFarland, CNN

Hailed as the future of retail, Amazon’s cashier-less Go stores have arguably been one of the most ambitious projects launched in the retail landscape in a long time. As an engineer myself, I am stunned by the scale and robustness of the system. Dilip Kumar, Jimmy Pang, and the rest of the Go team achieved what most people thought to be impossible. This robustness however comes at the cost of vast amounts of costly hardware, heavy computational requirements, devops, and numerous other challenges.