The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon • Hacker News Board

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#81

Post by mattikl » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 9:26 AM UTC

augustl wrote: post #77

> no direct reads of another team’s data store This reminds me of how App Store used to ban game emulators interpreting ROMs downloaded from the internet, while at the same time allowing XML parsing. Does it really matter if the interface you're talking to over the network is code written by another team, or data written by another team? I suppose implementation details are often hidden away in data stores, but does…

Direct reading effectively makes the data store an API, i.e. the API you provide is SQL SELECT over multiple tables instead of HTTP GET resource.

This pretty much freezes the database schema, the team owning it can no longer change it, because they don't know how the users use it. It also limits the possibilities to provide optimizations on the data (like caching).

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#82

Post by projectileboy » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 9:34 AM UTC

Kind of lame that it doesn’t even mention Steve Yegge or his blog, which is almost certainly the source.

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#83

Post by nemesisj » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 9:43 AM UTC

wging wrote: post #57

simonw wrote: post #13

Does anyone know who else was involved in constructing this memo? "There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever" Was Bezos deeply enough involved in Amazon's engineering to set those rules himself, or was the text of the memo influenced by a senior engineering group that he was worki…

The "text of the memo" is really just the article's author not understanding the context of Steve Yegge's years-later retelling, from which that text comes. "His Big Mandate went something along these lines" (Yegge's words right before the quoted text) doesn't even imply there was a singular 'memo' involved, and definitely (and obviously) wasn't meant to say that the text was actually what Bezos wrote. So the footnot…

I wish this comment was the top comment.

Not to be too critical, but this blog post is a (in my opinion, poor) rehash of Steve Yegge's infamous Google+ post which he accidentally posted online. It's entertaining and one of the most influential memos I've read in the last twenty years.

His followup memo was great as well.

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#84

Post by fnord123 » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 9:58 AM UTC

travisgriggs wrote: post #42

How far does this principle scale? I've heard of this strategy and thought "that's kinda cool." Amazon is obviously successful in its domain, so it would be easy to assume some causality. And yet, there's another big tech company, fruit symbol I think, that has played the long game of continually fine tuning the interaction points to make the integration of their parts more than the whole. They get credit for attenti…

Italy, France, and Portugal are playing a 4-3-3 at the Euros. Germany is using a 3-4-2-1. Hungary is playing a 3-5-2.

They can all be successful if you have the players executing their roles well. The structure and plan is necessary but it is not sufficient for success.

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#85

Post by KMag » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 9:59 AM UTC

oblio wrote: post #64

ramraj07 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite is the control theory anecdote (point 2 here: https://gigaom.com/2013/10/10/5-fun-and-terrifying-facts-abo... ). Some people are just able to grasp the core of a large number of topics really fast, and born-in-1964-Jeffrey seems to be one of them. It’s fairly clear he would be very well versed at various tech architectural designs even if he didn’t have a CS background, I’ve worked with several people (os…

> It’s fairly clear he would be very well versed at various tech architectural designs even if he didn’t have a CS background He does have a CS background.

> He does have a CS background.

The "even if he didn't" you quoted already implies this.

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#86

Post by oblio » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 10:18 AM UTC

KMag wrote: post #85

oblio wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s fairly clear he would be very well versed at various tech architectural designs even if he didn’t have a CS background He does have a CS background.

> He does have a CS background. The "even if he didn't" you quoted already implies this.

Ah, true.

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#87

Post by typedef_struct » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 10:32 AM UTC

I spent 2020 at AWS and I can't think of a single part of their toolchain that exposed APIs as first-class citizens. Not Pipelines, not Apollo, not CRUX, not Brazil, not MCM.

Its all command line applications and browser interfaces (the stuff first-year developers are most familiar with building, I suppose). I was familiar with this memo so it was quite a shock. Wish they'd taken their own advice.

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#88

Post by vermilingua » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 10:35 AM UTC

typedef_struct wrote: post #87

I spent 2020 at AWS and I can't think of a single part of their toolchain that exposed APIs as first-class citizens. Not Pipelines, not Apollo, not CRUX, not Brazil, not MCM. Its all command line applications and browser interfaces (the stuff first-year developers are most familiar with building, I suppose). I was familiar with this memo so it was quite a shock. Wish they'd taken their own advice.

…and what do the cli apps and browser interfaces use to connect with the tools?

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#89

Post by Gayax » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 10:36 AM UTC

It is exactly what author Cal Newport is recommending in his new book "A World Without Email" (March 2021): replacing the ping-pong of emails and meetings by standardized processes and requests via tools. It's simply incredible to see that Bezos saw this coming 20 years ago!

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#90

Post by occamrazor » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 10:47 AM UTC

vishnugupta wrote: post #67

travisgriggs wrote: post #42

How far does this principle scale? I've heard of this strategy and thought "that's kinda cool." Amazon is obviously successful in its domain, so it would be easy to assume some causality. And yet, there's another big tech company, fruit symbol I think, that has played the long game of continually fine tuning the interaction points to make the integration of their parts more than the whole. They get credit for attenti…

Amazon has created lot of these "things" (for the lack of a better word) that should be taken with a sack of salt. Door Desk, 2-Pizza Teams, Press Release and Frequently Asked Questions (PRFAQ), API Mandate, AWS as utilizing spare capacity, just to name a few. It's made out to be as if these are religiously practiced at Amazon but that's definitely not the case. I worked at one of the first remote dev centres of Amaz…

The “rumor” I know is that Amazon internally had a system broadly similar to S3/EC2, where a centralized infrastructure team made hardware resources available to the other teams through API.

Then Amazon realized that they could use a similar system with external customers. They built S3 and other services in a way similar to their internal infrastructure, but completely separate.

Only years later Amazon started using AWS for their internal services.