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> For reasons that seem baffling in retrospect, Amazon understood this long before any of its major competitors I don't think Amazon really "understood". It's

by crdb 11y ago

> For reasons that seem baffling in retrospect, Amazon understood this long before any of its major competitors I don't think Amazon really "understood". It's more that (according to "The Everything Store", anyway), accidentally, some emergency servers were reprovisioned as servers on demand for a bunch of frustrated devs who couldn't get resources the traditional way. And then demand just exploded and they thought why not sell it and see what happens. It is true that Bezos appears to have a knack for spotting great products that appear accidentally in his org tree, and spinning it out as a separate team (e.g. the A9 team, Kindle...) but it might be that he thinks like a VC and backs everything that looks interesting instead of letting the bureaucracy kill it, and hindsight is 20/20...

Arnt 11y ago
A memo was published (or leaked?) in which he said, abbreviated and misquoted: "Our internal services shall be robust enough to sell as services on the big bad internet. Assuming friendly callers is a firing offense." "Why not sell it" is a bit of a joke. Before you can say that, you have to have a platform that's designed to handle unfriendly users. Users who may be presumed to attack each other and the platform. Setting that up doesn't happen by accident.
lubos 11y ago
There was another essay from Steve Yegge some years ago where he was comparing Amazon vs Google (he worked for both companies) and how Amazon completely transformed themselves into using internal APIs as the only method of communication between teams within the company. Yegge has recalled an email to all Amazon staff where Bezos outlined new Amazon rules. This was in 2002. 1.) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces. 2.) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces. 3.) There will be no other form of inter-process communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network. 4.) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions. Especially the last point of the memo is very telling because it shows that Amazon was planning to externalize artifacts of various teams within Amazon at least 4 years before AWS was actually born.
- Pamar 11y ago
  Here the full Yegge tale (or at least a publicly available copy): https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX
  - fizixer 11y ago
    reading it the second time (last time I read it a year ago): - Is ad business model a major reason Google is not providing a platform or hesitant about it? (Out of Amazon/Apple/FB/MS, FB is the only other primarily ad-based company (or is it?) so I wonder how FB is doing it). Because programmatic interfaces means developers can program out ads (unless there's a way for a service provider to avoid that situation, IDK). - Or has Google moved towards platform/accessibility model recently? or is it same old same old?
InclinedPlane 11y ago
Also, they had to move to a SoA because they stopped being able to link the whole site on one 32-bit machine due to memory constraints.

by crdb 11y ago

Arnt 11y ago

A memo was published (or leaked?) in which he said, abbreviated and misquoted: "Our internal services shall be robust enough to sell as services on the big bad internet. Assuming friendly callers is a firing offense." "Why not sell it" is a bit of a joke. Before you can say that, you have to have a platform that's designed to handle unfriendly users. Users who may be presumed to attack each other and the platform. Setting that up doesn't happen by accident.

lubos 11y ago

There was another essay from Steve Yegge some years ago where he was comparing Amazon vs Google (he worked for both companies) and how Amazon completely transformed themselves into using internal APIs as the only method of communication between teams within the company. Yegge has recalled an email to all Amazon staff where Bezos outlined new Amazon rules. This was in 2002. 1.) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces. 2.) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces. 3.) There will be no other form of inter-process communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network. 4.) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions. Especially the last point of the memo is very telling because it shows that Amazon was planning to externalize artifacts of various teams within Amazon at least 4 years before AWS was actually born.

Pamar 11y ago
Here the full Yegge tale (or at least a publicly available copy): https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX
- fizixer 11y ago
  reading it the second time (last time I read it a year ago): - Is ad business model a major reason Google is not providing a platform or hesitant about it? (Out of Amazon/Apple/FB/MS, FB is the only other primarily ad-based company (or is it?) so I wonder how FB is doing it). Because programmatic interfaces means developers can program out ads (unless there's a way for a service provider to avoid that situation, IDK). - Or has Google moved towards platform/accessibility model recently? or is it same old same old?

InclinedPlane 11y ago

Also, they had to move to a SoA because they stopped being able to link the whole site on one 32-bit machine due to memory constraints.