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OK, I like his notion that 'becoming big is failure'. But... what about websites like Amazon.com? That’s BIG with capital letters. How did they lose? They oper
by spazmaster 17y ago
OK, I like his notion that 'becoming big is failure'. But... what about websites like Amazon.com? That’s BIG with capital letters.
How did they lose? They operate successfully due to marginal costs on all fronts including their website.
I would like to hear some ideas out here on projects like Amazon.com.
- zaphar 17y agoJust because the product is big doesn't mean its a monolithic codebase. Amazon is powered by a lot of different pieces. Decoupling let's you keep the pieces small and yet grow and scale to huge sizes.
- Tamerlin 17y agoIt's also a maintenance nightmare. A LOT of that code is terrible, there's a lot of tight coupling, and a heavy reliance on developers with pagers to keep the mess operating. There's a reason that they have such insane turnover so few people who stick around after they collect their signing bonuses...
- spazmaster 17y agothanks, that's some interesting information. that does strengthen the OP's case. Loose coupling should be possible but a rarely seen feat I reckon for websites of this scale. I wonder how "loosely" coupled and well architected the 2.0 sites are like digg and facebook?
- aaronblohowiak 17y agoYou can read about facebook's architecture at highscalability and other sites of that ilk.
- zaphar 17y agoAre you speaking from experience?
- tybris 17y agoAmazon is powered by an army of engineers coming to the rescue when something fails again.
- chrisbolt 17y agoACM has a great interview with Werner Vogels, Amazon's CTO, about how their platform is structured. http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1142065 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1142065