The Amazon Technology Platform

Don420 writes "Jim Gray has an interview with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels for ACM Queue. It is filled with a lot of details about the Amazon architecture that we have not seen before: 'If you hit the Amazon.com gateway page, the application calls more than 100 services to collect data and construct the page for you.' But also quite a strong statements about developing software at Amazon: 'Developers of our services can use any tools they see fit to build their services. [...] Whatever tools are necessary, we provide them, and then get the hell out of the way of the developers so that they can do their jobs. [...] Developers are like artists; they produce their best work if they have the freedom to do so, but they need good tools.'"

Comments

Re:100 Services ?

[shmlco]

Ever considered the amount of data that has to be churned through to build your average custom My Yahoo home page? Especially one with a ton of custom news items, stocks, local weather, local movie listings, and so on?

Major web sites are just a "little" more complex than your typical iWeb home page...

But they need good tools

[wysiwia]

Sure anybody need good tools to produces something exceptional. But what can you do if the needed tools aren't available? What can developers do if they aren't happy with their tools or their environment?

For users the answer is easy, they simply switch to something different, but for developer it's not. You usually first have to get a lot of knowledge which needs time. But one does never get more time!

So developers have to think in advance sometimes several years. This means constantly be on the edge of the available knowledge. Tools can certainly help but nothing prevents you from getting the knowledge in advance.

O. Wyss

Re:Good Tools?

[mahangu]

There is an idiom in my native tongue of Sinhala for this - natanna bari minihata polova adai, which translated directly (albeit a little clunkily) reads the ground is always uneven for the person who can't dance.

Having said this, I'm sure everyone agrees that a certain amount of tools are necessary to be productive. All in all though, I think this article sums up the value of tools pretty well.

The next wave: Service Oriented Architectures

[NovaX]

What Amazon is describing is their SOA and their efforts to make it a generic, base platform for a large multitude of services. The idea of having a service grid, where services are easily developed, deployed, and work seemlessly together, has been gaining a lot of momentium in the last few years. A number of companies are posed to shift the playing field from an ASP model to a network of service.

The article is impressive in hearing how Amazon successfully migrated from their legacy platform to a SOA. They may become a real contender in this emerging market, considering that they already have the user base and are quickly maturing a powerful platform. The other major contenders are Rearden Commerce and Salesforce.

Rearden Commerce, the company I work for, has developed a very pure SOA. They are currently targetting enterprise customers in order to gain the critical mass and user adoption necessary to succeed, which can be very difficult for a startup working in the consumer market. Their goal is to provide a web-based personal assistent that you can use to book plane tickets, dinning, etc. and all coordinated with your peers and working with your calendar and notification preferences (email, SMS, voice). It looks as if Amazon is on a similar path, so it will be interesting to see what happens in the next few years.

After the critical mass and the base platform are available the next big issue is getting 3rd party developers on the platform. That's something that everyone seems to be working on, which is why we're seeing so many AJAX and other toolkits emerging from companies like Yahoo, Google, and Zimbra. Imagine another company's product integrating just as neatly with Gmail as Google Calendar, yet staying very decoupled. That's part of the promise, and is the next big hurdle for the SOA leaders even though their platforms are still quite fresh and new.