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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.'"
'If you hit the Amazon.com gateway page, the application calls more than 100 services to collect data and construct the page for you.'
and this a good thing ?
Having unlimited development budget is definitely THE good thing I sometimes miss myself ;)
Marcin
I wonder if the actual developers/coders see it that way themselves. Sadly, CxO's often have a warped view of how things work "on the floor".
Black holes are where God divided by zero
Of course, Amazon can't be around for much longer at the rate they're cutting it down.
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
See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
Well *Some* developers are like Artists, others are more like Naïve painters with unlimited budgets for colors and huge canvases.
839*929
...but at the end of the day it's the developer's talent and experience that tell most of the picture. It sounds like Amazon do let their developers decide (to a large extent) how their products are going to work.
The transition from the monolithic Obidos to the current SOA makes me wonder how exactly that part of the system works. Though it's not (that I could see) explictly stated, it certainly seems that adding scalability was a long and painful process. Planning for future developments like this is something that developers tend to be much better at than managers - so I wonder whether the developers didn't think about including scalability hooks in their initial efforts, whether they decided (back in the early days) that it wasn't worth it, or whether they wanted to but were told not to bother.
All said, I do applaud the public stance that Vogels is taking in his attitude. If more CxOs shared it, we'd likely have beeter-designed systems all over the shop. You hire the developer because (s)he's good at developing - so let them go to it!
My, that was a yummy potato!
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.
Yes.
Developers of our services can use any tools they see fit to build their services.
I wonder how they avoid the maintenance nightmare which is having multiple application components done using various obscure technologies/tools and the person that did it leaving the company and somebody else having to maintain/extend those application components?
Do they standardize their build tools, require good documentation on the service implementations or just overwork the poor sods that have to do maintenance to death?
This interview, while I'm sure sincere on the part of the CTO, comes across as a recruiting pitch. Obvious fallacies:
"Developers themselves know best which tools make them most productive and which tools are right for the job."
This sort of development mishmash depends on the developers never leaving (which most do after 2-3 years). Maintenance is, at best, nightmarish and leads to a patchy (with apologies to Apache) mess. FWIW, most developers seem to jump into coding right away with no thought for architecture or design.
"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."
Hmm, so the developers manage themselves. What a great job being a manager must be there.
"Developers are like artists; they produce their best work if they have the freedom to do so"
In my experience, most developers are nothing like artists and more closely resemble petulant, undisciplined children. Often they ignore the most basic principles of good software development (like version control, automated build and test suites, documentation, etc.) because "those are boring".
"I think part of the chaotic nature--the emerging nature--of Amazon's platform is that there are many tools available"
Wow, CTO speak at its finest to explain the disorganized nature of the organization.
"As a result of this principle, we have many support tools that are of a self-help nature."
See my point above about documentation being boring.
Comments I've heard from people who work at Amazon:
Your mileage may vary.....
Move away from the coasts. I make $75,000/year working 40 hour weeks. I'm not on-call, have flex hours, get 3 weeks of vacation, and unlimited sick time. Quit working for IT sweat shops. Move somewhere where family time is valued and it's impossible to hire people unless you are willing to give them that flexibility. I've been through four employers in the St. Louis area and been able to land jobs with a deal akin to this one at all four. Developers are "poor"? No. Elementary school teachers are "poor." Starting salary for a developer in a low-watt market is close to $40K without a degree. That's not "poor." That's not starving, and that's not living for their work, unless by "living for their work" you mean that you're expected to show up on time and do your job.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
I worked at amazon for two years. I never saw any use of Haskel, SML or any other functional language. 90% of all work at amazon is some combination of C++ and Perl, with a few groups trying to transition to Java.
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.
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