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The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

chrislaing.net

21–30 of 136 posts

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#21
post #8

Things like these are taken as dogma or a religion -- and are applied to all things in an organization, for better or for worse. When there's a case for tighter coupling and less services, (and yes, there are cases for it), this memo gets brought up and microservices win the argument.

What is an organizational case for tighter coupling and fewer services? Downsizing with an intent to not grow in the same direction again?

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#22
As much as anyone who uses AWS and its various client libraries can attest to the areas this manifesto didn't solve, I think it's still very much the right way to go, and I think the success of AWS was at least significantly attributable to it. I've been part of several projects whose goal was to build Good interfaces on top of services after the fact, and I'm absolutely convinced that the shittiest interface in the world built in from the start trumps whatever you think you're going to be able to do later.

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#24

Always worth reading Yegge's insider take on this - https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 . The Golden Rule of Platforms, "Eat Your Own Dogfood", can be rephrased as "Start with a Platform, and Then Use it for Everything." You can't just bolt it on later. Certainly not easily at any rate -- ask anyone who worked on platformizing MS Office. Or anyone who worked on platformizing Amazon. If you delay it, it'll be t…

> But making something a platform is not going to make you an instant success. A platform needs a killer app.

Which is a big ask, since

> The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them. You can't do that.

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#26
I wish GitHub under Microsoft followed this philosophy. So much of their repository management can be done through their APIs, but you hit some painful brick walls around things like enterprise security where you could really use centralized management.

My business area uses around 200 repositories. APIs aren’t really optional at that scale.

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#27
post #21
post #8

Things like these are taken as dogma or a religion -- and are applied to all things in an organization, for better or for worse. When there's a case for tighter coupling and less services, (and yes, there are cases for it), this memo gets brought up and microservices win the argument.

What is an organizational case for tighter coupling and fewer services? Downsizing with an intent to not grow in the same direction again?

Each Service adds a marginal cost to maintenance, ops, infrastructure and debatably development speed (Easier to refactor in an IDE and semi-atomically deployed code than 50 independent services ).

If you have a team of 5 people, launching 50 services is probably not as efficient as 10 services.

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#28
Have this mandate in Google

You'll have every engineer complaining and stop working to fight their freedom and finally the change has to be reverted. And 5 years later, oh my god, Amazon is doing that, we need to move to that direction as well...

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#29
post #25

If every part of Amazon is really like that, then it'll make the task of breaking them up much easier!

That's actually quite possibly true, if they were indeed broken up. But a hypothetical breakup might also forbid certain (or any) kinds of collaboration between any of them, which might include calling each other's APIs.

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#30
> 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. No exceptions.

I wonder how this is accomplished for event driven architectures built on shared event buses.

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