The Amazon Technology Platform

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Tuesday May 16, 2006 @09:24PM from the under-the-covers dept.

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.'"

2 of 109 comments (clear)

Sounds (almost) too good to be true... by allanj · 2006-05-16 21:47 · Score: 5, Interesting

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".

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Black holes are where God divided by zero
Artists? by should_be_linear · 2006-05-16 23:12 · Score: 5, Funny

Well *Some* developers are like Artists, others are more like Naïve painters with unlimited budgets for colors and huge canvases.

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839*929