10 ms·

Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D

326 points by rrrgggrrr 15y ago

revorad 15y ago
PR damage control?
- matthavener 15y ago
  I think so, but not for the reddit/EBS outage.
  - mfringel 15y ago
    Exactly. This is all about their earnings. Given a general trend towards decreasing or outsourcing R&D, Amazon is still doing it in-house, because it's their competitive advantage. Explaining that to a bunch of panicky stockholders who just saw a Big Ugly show up on the cashflow statement is mandatory, no matter how much they care about the long-term.
    - icey 15y ago
      I feel like I'm missing something. As of this moment (9:42AM PDT) Amazon's stock is up 5.6% for the day and near a 52 week high. That doesn't seem like panicky shareholders to me. I'm not a stock maven, so it's possible that I'm missing some important detail.
      - groovylick 15y ago
        AZMN stock climbed over 8% during the AWS outage, the market is disconnected from reality.
        jmatthews 15y ago
        Just reading his run up regarding their distributed server technology it read to me like a brief ad for AppEngine. I'm thinking about all of the hardcore neuron work that went in to their infrastructure and how I'm getting a competing product for a song.
        neuroelectronic 15y ago
        for liberal definitions of "competing" The only similar cloud services are from Microsoft and Google and they are about the same price, definitely not "a song" territory.
        jmatthews 15y ago
        I meant that given your app works within the restrictions of GAE you get the benefit of a lot of brainpower from men with long beards. Maybe the association was temporal as I'd just finished watching an IO presentation about how to scheme data for appengine where the detail was primarily the same as Bezos' first few paragraphs.
        neuroelectronic 15y ago
        Like many conversations, this conflict was only a result of miscommunication.
        brown9-2 15y ago
        the market is disconnected from reality Or perhaps, the impact of any EBS/AWS outage has very little impact on the overall health and success of the entire Amazon business.
- protomyth 15y ago
  Interestingly, the number of sites affected might have been a revelation to Wall Street on the importance of Amazon cloud services.
prpon 15y ago
That letter is so geeky, I doubt if 90% of amazon investors would get the things he was explaining. As a geek though, I love it.
- michaelochurch 15y ago
  My feeling about it was that it was written to appeal to top programmers, not investors except so far as "You can read this letter, in which I prove that I know the language one needs to speak to hire smart people".
  - athst 15y ago
    Good point - maybe this is just the greatest recruiting tactic ever.
jordanb 15y ago
Judging from things Steve Yegge has written about Amazon, and from friends of mine who have worked there, I don't get the impression that Amazon is a company dedicated to technical excellence. In particular I seem to recall something about 40 million lines of C++ code in their core product, and about mediocre engineering talent and high levels of burnout due to the technical debt they're required to deal with... In fact, ever-increasing engineering costs would be just as indicative of mounting technical debt as it would of an increasing commitment to R&D.
- petercooper 15y ago
  In my experience, their tech job listings list tech degrees as a must-have. That seems to be a common attribute of companies that care more about HR box ticking than technical excellence, alas.
  - mikle 15y ago
    More than that, it is very easy for only one programmer or researcher doing a bad job to create technical debt that will take disproportional time to pay off.
  - daeken 15y ago
    I thought about going to Amazon when I decided to get out of the startup world about 6 months ago. I went through the standard application process, and promptly closed the tab when I found that they would only accept my r�sum� in MS Word format -- rejected PDFs, HTML, and even plaintext. It may seem like a silly reason not to work somewhere, but I think that the hiring process says more about a company than just about anything else.
    - webspiderus 15y ago
      I pretty much do the same - mostly since I decided to typeset my resume a while ago, and converting it to anything, particularly MS Word, just feels like a travesty.
    - flink 15y ago
px 15y ago
Investors want higher margins but obviously Amazon is investing substantially in itself. So far, though, Bezos seems to be winning the tug of war. Many analysts are glad to see higher revenue and feel that Amazon is cementing its position at the top of the ecommerce world. AMZN shares are up over 5% despite the earnings miss.
czhiddy 15y ago
Interesting how AMZN jumps 5% after missing earnings, yet GOOG drops nearly 10% with nearly the exact same results (increased hiring and expenses resulting in lower than expected profit).
- meterplech 15y ago
  I think that is because investors believe in Jeff Bezos more as CEO than Larry Page. Bezos comes from Wall Street, so Wall Streeters probably have more confidence in him. Plus he has been CEO for a long time, whereas Page comes from academia and just started the role (again).
- brown9-2 15y ago
  I think it's really silly to try to draw out any meaning, or even assume any meaning exists in the first place, in single-day movements or reactions like these. What happens in a few hours of trading after earnings announcements means nothing after a few days.
- Eliezer 15y ago
  Stocks don't react to how results in announcements compare to last year, stocks react to how results in announcements compare with how Wall Street priced the stock yesterday based on their guess to what the results would be. Efficient markets 101 - otherwise you could make money by buying, one day in advance, stocks that obviously probably did well compared to last year. If this is not obvious to you then you should never invest in anything besides index funds (seriously, I've seen people do really badly by not understanding elementary implications of the inexploitable markets hypothesis).
  - anatari 15y ago
    Um, missing earnings means earnings was less than what the wall street analysts expected, it doesn't mean it was less than last year.
    - Symmetry 15y ago
      I thought it generally meant that it was less than the company's own predictions, not the analysts? In any event it shouldn't matter which estimate they're falling short of as long as it isn't the market's implicit estimate.
sahillavingia 15y ago
$AMZN stock is flying right now: http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:AMZN http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:AMZN
- ZackOfAllTrades 15y ago
  Why?
  - Seth_Kriticos 15y ago
    They just announced their quarterly results: http://www.americanbankingnews.com/2011/04/27/amazon-com-inc-amzn-announces-quarterly-results-misses-estimates-by-0-16-eps/ http://www.americanbankingnews.com/2011/04/27/amazon-com-inc...
- JabavuAdams 15y ago
  Lol. Sold a bunch of AMZN last week to buy AAPL, just before AAPL announced earnings. Looks like I should have kept AMZN. As a Canadian, the whole currency conversion thing adds another source of risk.
  - 3pt14159 15y ago
    I was mulling over that exact trade, but figured the relatively small amount of AMZN I had didn't justify getting off my tush. Sold a couple hours ago with a solid 60% up in 10 months (usd -> usd) and 41% in CAD terms. I'm fairly bullish on AAPL, but I already own 200 shares (selling medium term call options, hence the 100s multiple) so buying some more probably isn't worth it. Just going to keep it in cash until I see something. Do you have any experience in hedging your US investments by shorting the USD? I'm wondering if the additional fees are worth it.
    - JabavuAdams 15y ago
      Re Hedging FOREX: Nope. It's something I'm interested in learning about, though.
javanix 15y ago
The end result of all this behind-the-scenes software? Fast, accurate search results that help you find what you want. Has Bezos ever actually used Amazon's search functionality? I know it isn't the easiest problem in the world to solve, but their search is by far the worst of any of the major shopping sites that I use on a regular basis.
- pkteison 15y ago
  Specific examples? It seems pretty good to me. Which shopping site has a better search, and what makes it better? Exact keyword match is obviously fine. "harry potter and the sorcerer's stone" gives me various options for buying that book and a bunch of other harry potter related books, and i can sort by some useful options like reviews or bestselling. Harder problems, Google shopping vs amazon: Misspellings: Hairy Potter - Amazon suggests 'did you mean Harry Potter?', but does not initially put that book in front of me. When I check again later they are now providing a second list, "Results for "harry potter" (corrected from "hairy potter")" Google shopping shows me the Did you Mean question, search results are the lego sets and one movie. Concepts/descriptions instead of exact thing: "Boy Wizard Series" - both fail to suggest harry potter to me, but they do start with "Harry, a History" which might be enough to jog my memory. Still, no real points here, but this is a hard problem, and I don't know any shopping site that does it well. Even Google's regular web search is not fantastic at this, hitting mostly news articles and not reading my mind and popping out with "I bet you want to see information about Harry Potter..." So where's the trouble?
  - Splines 15y ago
    In particular, searches for computer equipment is generally frustrating. I've also seen sorts result in a large number of irrelevant outdated used items getting filtered to the top.[1] I'm willing to cut them slack since it's good enough, but look at Newegg to see how it should be done. It's not a completely fair comparison (since Newegg specializes in this), but they do it so much better.[2] [1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_i_0?rh=k%3A16gb+sdhc%2Ci%3Aelectronics&keywords=16gb+sdhc&ie=UTF8&qid=1303934061#/ref=sr_st?keywords=16gb+sdhc&qid=1303934069&rh=k%3A16gb+sdhc%2Cn%3A172282&sort=price http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_i_0?rh=k%3A16gb+sd... [2] http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&IsNodeId=1&Description=16gb%20sdhc&bop=And&Order=PRICE&PageSize=20 http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&#3...
spinchange 15y ago
This is instructive. Google's stock might not have tanked as hard the other week if LP had come out and placated the street with some jargon like this, re: Google's also ballooning expenses.
- athst 15y ago
  Bezos explicitly said it in this letter - he expects all of this stuff to make the company gobs of money in the future. For a lot of the stuff Google spends money on, I don't think investors are necessarily very confident that it will have the same impact on future profits.
TWADDLE 15y ago
Its funny how people seem to be whining about Amazon. In fact Amazon is one of the best places in terms of innovation. In addition to having a strong core business, they also have AWS, kindle, android app store. Who cares if their legacy codebase is 40 milllions lines of C++ and not your hip Ruby or LIPS nonsense. The truth is that they get work done. AWS is one of the best cloud computing system out there. Nothing else comes even closer. Dropbox, Heroku and Reddit all rely on them. Who cares if they take resume in word format, they pay well. Its sad to see HN turning into a language fanboi and apple fanboi club. The AWS EC2 outage did not even affect 0.01% of their revenue.
- jacques_chester 15y ago
  My understanding is that the original code for Amazon was written in hip Lisp nonsense with some ironic-retro C thrown in.
- nika 15y ago
  Let me guess- you've never worked at Amazon, have you? There may be 40 million lines of C++ code there, I don't know, but I do know there was a massive Java code base, plus every other random hip language that had a moment of popularity. That was part of the problem- nothing was consistent or coherent, and you had to babysit a lot of old code written in the language of the moment by a team of ok programmers with bad management that has long since been dissolved (or if the code is only a couple years old) moved onto some other part of the platform. AWS is a new code base, and it isn't very innovative. In fact I don't think it is a very good cloud system, but then my criteria are probably different than yours. The idea that "nothing comes close" seems kinda silly. And no, they don't pay well. They don't even pay what they promise. "Its sad to see HN turning into a language fanboi and apple fanboi club." Your account was created within an hour of writing that. I think that the decline of HN is more due to the influx of people who think those who don't hate apple are "fanboi"s and think that name calling is appropriate. Personally, when I see the use of that term, it communicates to me that the person calling others "fanbois" is prejudiced against anyone who doesn't also hate Apple or "LIPS" [sic]
vaidhy 15y ago
Disclaimer:I work at Amazon as a dev manager. Working at Amazon does mean that you need to work hard, long and smart. There is a lot of technical debt to deal with too. But the technical debt did not come from bad design, but from the way business grows and changes. There is a 20% growth YoY. Inventories run into millions of products across multiple warehouses. We ship through multiple means and we ensure the product shipped reaches the customer on the promised date at over 95% of the time. In real life, this means that you are going to have trade-offs and some of the trade-offs do turn into technical debt. What we do with the debt is more important and amongst my groups, we are decreasing the debt by leaps and bounds. If you want to see how it is, give me a shout. We are hiring, as usual :) I can take resumes in any format too :)
- senthil_rajasek 15y ago
  How long have you worked at Amazon and where are you based?
  - vaidhy 15y ago
    I have been there for about a year and based out of Hyderabad.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
cmelbye 15y ago
This is only slightly on-topic, but regarding the service-oriented architecture that he mentions at the beginning of the article, how would one implement this internal? Specifically, how would you communicate with your internal services? Just an HTTP API? Is that fast enough? Another thing I'm wondering is what's the best way to handle internal authentication between your frontend and some backend service for example? Sorry if this is too specific for this discussion, but I've just always wondered this and I figure that HN knows.
- adpowers 15y ago
  I don't think it covers authentication, but take a look at Thrift: http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/ http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/ It provides an RPC framework and IDL.
  - iam 15y ago
    If only thrift had some sort of signal/event support :(.
- shykes 15y ago
  DotCloud [1] is built from the ground up around distributed services. We use a custom rpc mechanism called ZeroRPC. It uses ZeroMQ [2] for transport, msgpack [3] for serialization, and some extra glue for RPC mechanics, discovery, event dispatching, etc. Among other neat tricks, it allows us to handle synchronous RPC calls and asynchronous message passing in a unified way. It also maps transparently to any ZeroMQ topology. Combine this with the recent release of gevent support for zeromq [4] and you get a fun, fun playground :) [1] http://www.dotcloud.com http://www.dotcloud.com [2] http://www.zeromq.org http://www.zeromq.org [3] http://msgpack.org http://msgpack.org [4] https://github.com/zllak/gevent-zeromq https://github.com/zllak/gevent-zeromq
  - cmelbye 15y ago
    Oh, awesome, thank you!. I never thought to use ZeroMQ, but that would work perfectly. Ironically, it doesn't seem like DotCloud supports these sorts of architectures very well yet, any plans to fix that? ;)
aphexairlines 15y ago
I wish the company would reveal some information on the internal systems he outlined in his letter. Amazon's architecture is impressive and its infrastructure teams build great stuff to help developers get their work done & deployed. Exposing these things would be a powerful recruiting tool.

326 points by rrrgggrrr 15y ago

revorad 15y ago

PR damage control?

matthavener 15y ago
I think so, but not for the reddit/EBS outage.
- mfringel 15y ago
  Exactly. This is all about their earnings. Given a general trend towards decreasing or outsourcing R&D, Amazon is still doing it in-house, because it's their competitive advantage. Explaining that to a bunch of panicky stockholders who just saw a Big Ugly show up on the cashflow statement is mandatory, no matter how much they care about the long-term.
  - icey 15y ago
    I feel like I'm missing something. As of this moment (9:42AM PDT) Amazon's stock is up 5.6% for the day and near a 52 week high. That doesn't seem like panicky shareholders to me. I'm not a stock maven, so it's possible that I'm missing some important detail.
    - groovylick 15y ago
      AZMN stock climbed over 8% during the AWS outage, the market is disconnected from reality.
      - jmatthews 15y ago
        Just reading his run up regarding their distributed server technology it read to me like a brief ad for AppEngine. I'm thinking about all of the hardcore neuron work that went in to their infrastructure and how I'm getting a competing product for a song.
        neuroelectronic 15y ago
        for liberal definitions of "competing" The only similar cloud services are from Microsoft and Google and they are about the same price, definitely not "a song" territory.
        jmatthews 15y ago
        I meant that given your app works within the restrictions of GAE you get the benefit of a lot of brainpower from men with long beards. Maybe the association was temporal as I'd just finished watching an IO presentation about how to scheme data for appengine where the detail was primarily the same as Bezos' first few paragraphs.
        neuroelectronic 15y ago
        Like many conversations, this conflict was only a result of miscommunication.
      - brown9-2 15y ago
        the market is disconnected from reality Or perhaps, the impact of any EBS/AWS outage has very little impact on the overall health and success of the entire Amazon business.
protomyth 15y ago
Interestingly, the number of sites affected might have been a revelation to Wall Street on the importance of Amazon cloud services.

prpon 15y ago

That letter is so geeky, I doubt if 90% of amazon investors would get the things he was explaining. As a geek though, I love it.

michaelochurch 15y ago
My feeling about it was that it was written to appeal to top programmers, not investors except so far as "You can read this letter, in which I prove that I know the language one needs to speak to hire smart people".
- athst 15y ago
  Good point - maybe this is just the greatest recruiting tactic ever.

jordanb 15y ago

Judging from things Steve Yegge has written about Amazon, and from friends of mine who have worked there, I don't get the impression that Amazon is a company dedicated to technical excellence. In particular I seem to recall something about 40 million lines of C++ code in their core product, and about mediocre engineering talent and high levels of burnout due to the technical debt they're required to deal with... In fact, ever-increasing engineering costs would be just as indicative of mounting technical debt as it would of an increasing commitment to R&D.

petercooper 15y ago
In my experience, their tech job listings list tech degrees as a must-have. That seems to be a common attribute of companies that care more about HR box ticking than technical excellence, alas.
- mikle 15y ago
  More than that, it is very easy for only one programmer or researcher doing a bad job to create technical debt that will take disproportional time to pay off.
- daeken 15y ago
  I thought about going to Amazon when I decided to get out of the startup world about 6 months ago. I went through the standard application process, and promptly closed the tab when I found that they would only accept my r�sum� in MS Word format -- rejected PDFs, HTML, and even plaintext. It may seem like a silly reason not to work somewhere, but I think that the hiring process says more about a company than just about anything else.
  - webspiderus 15y ago
    I pretty much do the same - mostly since I decided to typeset my resume a while ago, and converting it to anything, particularly MS Word, just feels like a travesty.
  - flink 15y ago

px 15y ago

Investors want higher margins but obviously Amazon is investing substantially in itself. So far, though, Bezos seems to be winning the tug of war. Many analysts are glad to see higher revenue and feel that Amazon is cementing its position at the top of the ecommerce world. AMZN shares are up over 5% despite the earnings miss.

czhiddy 15y ago

Interesting how AMZN jumps 5% after missing earnings, yet GOOG drops nearly 10% with nearly the exact same results (increased hiring and expenses resulting in lower than expected profit).

meterplech 15y ago
I think that is because investors believe in Jeff Bezos more as CEO than Larry Page. Bezos comes from Wall Street, so Wall Streeters probably have more confidence in him. Plus he has been CEO for a long time, whereas Page comes from academia and just started the role (again).
brown9-2 15y ago
I think it's really silly to try to draw out any meaning, or even assume any meaning exists in the first place, in single-day movements or reactions like these. What happens in a few hours of trading after earnings announcements means nothing after a few days.
Eliezer 15y ago
Stocks don't react to how results in announcements compare to last year, stocks react to how results in announcements compare with how Wall Street priced the stock yesterday based on their guess to what the results would be. Efficient markets 101 - otherwise you could make money by buying, one day in advance, stocks that obviously probably did well compared to last year. If this is not obvious to you then you should never invest in anything besides index funds (seriously, I've seen people do really badly by not understanding elementary implications of the inexploitable markets hypothesis).
- anatari 15y ago
  Um, missing earnings means earnings was less than what the wall street analysts expected, it doesn't mean it was less than last year.
  - Symmetry 15y ago
    I thought it generally meant that it was less than the company's own predictions, not the analysts? In any event it shouldn't matter which estimate they're falling short of as long as it isn't the market's implicit estimate.

sahillavingia 15y ago

$AMZN stock is flying right now: http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:AMZN http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:AMZN

ZackOfAllTrades 15y ago
Why?
- Seth_Kriticos 15y ago
  They just announced their quarterly results: http://www.americanbankingnews.com/2011/04/27/amazon-com-inc-amzn-announces-quarterly-results-misses-estimates-by-0-16-eps/ http://www.americanbankingnews.com/2011/04/27/amazon-com-inc...
JabavuAdams 15y ago
Lol. Sold a bunch of AMZN last week to buy AAPL, just before AAPL announced earnings. Looks like I should have kept AMZN. As a Canadian, the whole currency conversion thing adds another source of risk.
- 3pt14159 15y ago
  I was mulling over that exact trade, but figured the relatively small amount of AMZN I had didn't justify getting off my tush. Sold a couple hours ago with a solid 60% up in 10 months (usd -> usd) and 41% in CAD terms. I'm fairly bullish on AAPL, but I already own 200 shares (selling medium term call options, hence the 100s multiple) so buying some more probably isn't worth it. Just going to keep it in cash until I see something. Do you have any experience in hedging your US investments by shorting the USD? I'm wondering if the additional fees are worth it.
  - JabavuAdams 15y ago
    Re Hedging FOREX: Nope. It's something I'm interested in learning about, though.

javanix 15y ago

The end result of all this behind-the-scenes software? Fast, accurate search results that help you find what you want. Has Bezos ever actually used Amazon's search functionality? I know it isn't the easiest problem in the world to solve, but their search is by far the worst of any of the major shopping sites that I use on a regular basis.

pkteison 15y ago
Specific examples? It seems pretty good to me. Which shopping site has a better search, and what makes it better? Exact keyword match is obviously fine. "harry potter and the sorcerer's stone" gives me various options for buying that book and a bunch of other harry potter related books, and i can sort by some useful options like reviews or bestselling. Harder problems, Google shopping vs amazon: Misspellings: Hairy Potter - Amazon suggests 'did you mean Harry Potter?', but does not initially put that book in front of me. When I check again later they are now providing a second list, "Results for "harry potter" (corrected from "hairy potter")" Google shopping shows me the Did you Mean question, search results are the lego sets and one movie. Concepts/descriptions instead of exact thing: "Boy Wizard Series" - both fail to suggest harry potter to me, but they do start with "Harry, a History" which might be enough to jog my memory. Still, no real points here, but this is a hard problem, and I don't know any shopping site that does it well. Even Google's regular web search is not fantastic at this, hitting mostly news articles and not reading my mind and popping out with "I bet you want to see information about Harry Potter..." So where's the trouble?
- Splines 15y ago
  In particular, searches for computer equipment is generally frustrating. I've also seen sorts result in a large number of irrelevant outdated used items getting filtered to the top.[1] I'm willing to cut them slack since it's good enough, but look at Newegg to see how it should be done. It's not a completely fair comparison (since Newegg specializes in this), but they do it so much better.[2] [1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_i_0?rh=k%3A16gb+sdhc%2Ci%3Aelectronics&keywords=16gb+sdhc&ie=UTF8&qid=1303934061#/ref=sr_st?keywords=16gb+sdhc&qid=1303934069&rh=k%3A16gb+sdhc%2Cn%3A172282&sort=price http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_i_0?rh=k%3A16gb+sd... [2] http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&IsNodeId=1&Description=16gb%20sdhc&bop=And&Order=PRICE&PageSize=20 http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&#3...

spinchange 15y ago

This is instructive. Google's stock might not have tanked as hard the other week if LP had come out and placated the street with some jargon like this, re: Google's also ballooning expenses.

athst 15y ago
Bezos explicitly said it in this letter - he expects all of this stuff to make the company gobs of money in the future. For a lot of the stuff Google spends money on, I don't think investors are necessarily very confident that it will have the same impact on future profits.

TWADDLE 15y ago

Its funny how people seem to be whining about Amazon. In fact Amazon is one of the best places in terms of innovation. In addition to having a strong core business, they also have AWS, kindle, android app store. Who cares if their legacy codebase is 40 milllions lines of C++ and not your hip Ruby or LIPS nonsense. The truth is that they get work done. AWS is one of the best cloud computing system out there. Nothing else comes even closer. Dropbox, Heroku and Reddit all rely on them. Who cares if they take resume in word format, they pay well. Its sad to see HN turning into a language fanboi and apple fanboi club. The AWS EC2 outage did not even affect 0.01% of their revenue.

jacques_chester 15y ago
My understanding is that the original code for Amazon was written in hip Lisp nonsense with some ironic-retro C thrown in.
nika 15y ago
Let me guess- you've never worked at Amazon, have you? There may be 40 million lines of C++ code there, I don't know, but I do know there was a massive Java code base, plus every other random hip language that had a moment of popularity. That was part of the problem- nothing was consistent or coherent, and you had to babysit a lot of old code written in the language of the moment by a team of ok programmers with bad management that has long since been dissolved (or if the code is only a couple years old) moved onto some other part of the platform. AWS is a new code base, and it isn't very innovative. In fact I don't think it is a very good cloud system, but then my criteria are probably different than yours. The idea that "nothing comes close" seems kinda silly. And no, they don't pay well. They don't even pay what they promise. "Its sad to see HN turning into a language fanboi and apple fanboi club." Your account was created within an hour of writing that. I think that the decline of HN is more due to the influx of people who think those who don't hate apple are "fanboi"s and think that name calling is appropriate. Personally, when I see the use of that term, it communicates to me that the person calling others "fanbois" is prejudiced against anyone who doesn't also hate Apple or "LIPS" [sic]

vaidhy 15y ago

Disclaimer:I work at Amazon as a dev manager. Working at Amazon does mean that you need to work hard, long and smart. There is a lot of technical debt to deal with too. But the technical debt did not come from bad design, but from the way business grows and changes. There is a 20% growth YoY. Inventories run into millions of products across multiple warehouses. We ship through multiple means and we ensure the product shipped reaches the customer on the promised date at over 95% of the time. In real life, this means that you are going to have trade-offs and some of the trade-offs do turn into technical debt. What we do with the debt is more important and amongst my groups, we are decreasing the debt by leaps and bounds. If you want to see how it is, give me a shout. We are hiring, as usual :) I can take resumes in any format too :)

senthil_rajasek 15y ago
How long have you worked at Amazon and where are you based?
- vaidhy 15y ago
  I have been there for about a year and based out of Hyderabad.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

cmelbye 15y ago

This is only slightly on-topic, but regarding the service-oriented architecture that he mentions at the beginning of the article, how would one implement this internal? Specifically, how would you communicate with your internal services? Just an HTTP API? Is that fast enough? Another thing I'm wondering is what's the best way to handle internal authentication between your frontend and some backend service for example? Sorry if this is too specific for this discussion, but I've just always wondered this and I figure that HN knows.

adpowers 15y ago
I don't think it covers authentication, but take a look at Thrift: http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/ http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/ It provides an RPC framework and IDL.
- iam 15y ago
  If only thrift had some sort of signal/event support :(.
shykes 15y ago
DotCloud [1] is built from the ground up around distributed services. We use a custom rpc mechanism called ZeroRPC. It uses ZeroMQ [2] for transport, msgpack [3] for serialization, and some extra glue for RPC mechanics, discovery, event dispatching, etc. Among other neat tricks, it allows us to handle synchronous RPC calls and asynchronous message passing in a unified way. It also maps transparently to any ZeroMQ topology. Combine this with the recent release of gevent support for zeromq [4] and you get a fun, fun playground :) [1] http://www.dotcloud.com http://www.dotcloud.com [2] http://www.zeromq.org http://www.zeromq.org [3] http://msgpack.org http://msgpack.org [4] https://github.com/zllak/gevent-zeromq https://github.com/zllak/gevent-zeromq
- cmelbye 15y ago
  Oh, awesome, thank you!. I never thought to use ZeroMQ, but that would work perfectly. Ironically, it doesn't seem like DotCloud supports these sorts of architectures very well yet, any plans to fix that? ;)

aphexairlines 15y ago

I wish the company would reveal some information on the internal systems he outlined in his letter. Amazon's architecture is impressive and its infrastructure teams build great stuff to help developers get their work done & deployed. Exposing these things would be a powerful recruiting tool.