(Former Amazonian, part of the team that drove the change to SOA at the time)
> Now I think that this internal email is what has actually stuck with me the most. Bezos realized that he had to change the internal communication infrastructure [..].
> He understood that a radical organizational change was required to arrange the internal dynamics in a way that would allow the creation of something like AWS.
This is quite a strong and opinionated statement. I'd agree that Jeff made this change to improve communication infrastructure for Amazon.com. I wouldn't agree that he made it to enable AWS - for two reasons.
First, Amazon started thinking about EC2 and S3 way way later than this. Second, Kindle and SimpleDB (now Dynamo) were similar independent bets. These projects were happening at the time of moving to SOA, but they weren't tied to it.
The one thing common across all of these products is - making informed bets on market fundamentals and enabling teams to deliver on them.
Now, I know of a few fairly senior Amazonians who read those forums. They have more context than I do. So, if they chime in and say that Jeff sent this email to enable AWS, I'll gladly take it. :)
Until then, I wouldn't extrapolate Steve Yegge's post to mean something about Jeff B.'s intentions, and build an overarching argument over it.
The beginnings of AWS, though, were for the retail site. We exposed search and browse and item metadata via an API first for a deal with AOL to provide them with product search and then later we opened it up to everyone. People built stuff like Simple Amazon on top of it, which I thought was pretty nice. I don't think this part of AWS exists anymore (please correct me if I'm wrong).
The first service exposed as what we'd today consider AWS was SQS and at the time it was kind of a head scratcher. Only later did we understand that it was glue for other services.
Minor nitpick, these are two separate services. SDB is still independently accessible and probably will be for a while. That being said they definitely don't encourage any new use of SDB and push Dynamo instead.
Kind of a shame because a modern NoSQL store with SQL support would be great for rapid prototyping before a concrete data schema is established.
I was under the impression that before AWS, Amazon did SOA'd almost the entirety of its departments, as in OP mail, every dept had to enable web services to other depts, creating an environment where
Between 2000/2003 Amazon started to learn how to properly make something that resembled AWS (launched in 2006), it was a necessity targeted towards scalability. What Yegge letter meant is that Amazon was doing SOA to all its depts, making these be useful both internally and externally
>"5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world."
So you see, it wasn't to enable AWS as the digital service as we know it, it was to build a scalable company that could use everything it had both to serve its needs, and also to sell it as a product (then, all services we all know EC2 etc). Bezos applied SOA as a company, not only to its digital philosophy. And this corporate move, with no precedent, enabled not only AWS, but the whole Amazon as it is today.
> Now I think that this internal email is what has actually stuck with me the most. Bezos realized that he had to change the internal communication infrastructure [..].
> He understood that a radical organizational change was required to arrange the internal dynamics in a way that would allow the creation of something like AWS.
This is quite a strong and opinionated statement. I'd agree that Jeff made this change to improve communication infrastructure for Amazon.com. I wouldn't agree that he made it to enable AWS - for two reasons.
First, Amazon started thinking about EC2 and S3 way way later than this. Second, Kindle and SimpleDB (now Dynamo) were similar independent bets. These projects were happening at the time of moving to SOA, but they weren't tied to it.
The one thing common across all of these products is - making informed bets on market fundamentals and enabling teams to deliver on them.
Now, I know of a few fairly senior Amazonians who read those forums. They have more context than I do. So, if they chime in and say that Jeff sent this email to enable AWS, I'll gladly take it. :)
Until then, I wouldn't extrapolate Steve Yegge's post to mean something about Jeff B.'s intentions, and build an overarching argument over it.