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Amazon actually dealt with this problem in a very elegant fashion, at some point they realized that crap cannot be excised from the system, the reality is due t

by kls 15y ago

Amazon actually dealt with this problem in a very elegant fashion, at some point they realized that crap cannot be excised from the system, the reality is due to integrations, 3rd party code and legacy that somewhere there is going to be crap. It was at this point that they started to move to a service based architecture in which they could isolate all business functions into black boxes or services. This way instead of having a monolithic crappy application you have disparate services with some good and some bad. Further they have service teams that are accountable to their business units for the quality of their code. So what they now had was a way to gauge very discrete units based on performance to identify bad solutions, it allowed them to surgically upgrade those areas while not affecting the rest of the system. They where able to replace those pieces of the system, by just ensuring that new solutions conformed to the old service contracts. I know that enterprise solutions don't get a lot of love here on HN because it is not the focus but SOA and by extension REST are very important technologies that help deal with the problem that you highlighted. Amazon, is a very good case study on the subject.

projectileboy 15y ago
Hmm, that's interesting. Did you witness this first-hand? If so, what were some of the struggles they faced?
- kls 15y ago
  No I did not, I have contacts in the organization, but more importantly, they did a good deal of postmortems and white papers on the subject which where pretty frank about their problems and the solutions they tried using to address them, highlighting what worked and how it worked and what failed and why it failed. I read most that where available because it was a treasure trove of experience in aligning a large organizations development to improve it's quality. As such there are not many other examples that have had the success in doing it that Amazon did. AWS and S3 where two new lines of business that came out of that alignment. They streamlined the idea of business and technology as services to the point that it became a commodity in their organization.

by kls 15y ago

projectileboy 15y ago

Hmm, that's interesting. Did you witness this first-hand? If so, what were some of the struggles they faced?

kls 15y ago
No I did not, I have contacts in the organization, but more importantly, they did a good deal of postmortems and white papers on the subject which where pretty frank about their problems and the solutions they tried using to address them, highlighting what worked and how it worked and what failed and why it failed. I read most that where available because it was a treasure trove of experience in aligning a large organizations development to improve it's quality. As such there are not many other examples that have had the success in doing it that Amazon did. AWS and S3 where two new lines of business that came out of that alignment. They streamlined the idea of business and technology as services to the point that it became a commodity in their organization.