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The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

chrislaing.net

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Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#91

Post by ncsurfus »

vermilingua wrote: post #88
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?

Yeah, all of those tools have APIs…

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#92

Post by HelloNurse »

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…

Typical Apple products and services are fewer, more complex, and with enormously longer development time than Typical Amazon "products", so they could find processes that target great quality at high cost (e.g. "ask Steve Jobs") more useful than processes that target good enough quality at minimum cost.

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#94

Post by xyzelement »

yosamino wrote: post #53
xyzelement wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really easy to be a nice guy by reacting the way you did, but if the quote above is real, it should be studied and celebrated. Let me break it down for you - Amazon bet the farm on this strategy and it worked out amazingly. Not following this strategy is equivalent to sabotaging the most important thing the company is doing. While I suspect this quote is tongue in cheek, it SHOULD be a fire able offense for some…

How did we end up in a place where we demand the system of government be democratic, with all the emotional language of freedom, self-determination and so on. And then we carved out an exception and made it so our places where we work are run as oppressive dictatorships... Dont agree with what the bossman said?: "You're fired!" And the people love it so much, they even democratically elected the poster child of that…

// And then we carved out an exception and made it so our places where we work are run as oppressive dictatorships...

That's just a bunch of random words you're saying. Reality: we're building a company so we can create wealth and support our families and achieve something. We have a plan for doing it. If you're not following the plan and just sabotaging everything, you're doing exactly that - sabotaging.

This is different than saying "hey, I don't agree, let's discuss and challenge the plat" - that's great and admirable and you should do that (and I suspect you don't actually do that in your workplace). But to silently read the strategy and then say "ah fuck'it doesn't apply to me" is a huge fuck you to your colleagues. You have chosen to accept the job and the mission, do the job.

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#95

Post by slver »

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…

I think you're trying to compare and contrast things that don't contradict each other. Having APIs is one thing (and Apple has lots of APIs about many things), and integrating the whole experience is another. Amazon and Apple do both.

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#96

Post by pjmlp »

nivertech wrote: post #70
ketzo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like Google's approach is more popularized I mean, the engineering architecture being described in this memo is, basically, microservices. That's certainly an extremely popular -- I would go so far as to say even vogue -- pattern for solving the problem of building software at scale.

No, they're just services - a service per team. Microservices usually overdoing it, when you have multiple microservices per team, and sometimes even per developer. Also, microservices sometimes implemented incorrectly, where they're still communicate via shared databases, instead of encapsulating them and exposing them via service APIs only. This Memo was born because of the real business need, while many modern mic…

Indeed, hence "the network is the computer" footnote that used to be written on Sun manuals.

Many cargo cult web services of today can be written in Sun RPC APIs.

But yeah it is C and its IDL isn't as cool as gRPC proto files.

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#97

Post by pjmlp »

tus89 wrote: post #48

> It doesn’t matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter. CORBA is quite close to direct linking, with a network in between. The developer does not see it as a service or protocol, but a library call, which is rather the point. And it's not very compatible with the next one: > All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizabl…

Mostly because they got hit by J2EE rewrites fashion wave.

Their are now back via the gRPC fashion wave, until something else "improves" it.

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#98

Post by amazondrone12 »

As a current Amazon employee I can confirm this is no longer the case or only applies to such a select few pieces of software that it doesn't actually mean what you think it does. The amount of day to day stuff that is relied upon that runs on greasemonkey scripts and web scraping is insane. API's for a ton of things don't exist or are have heavy gatekeeping. (eg. contact x to get onboarded to our API and they just ghost you). Of course you can get a high level leader to tell you to use a proper API in a mailing list email thread where you are trying to get help to solve a problem but they will not actually help you get working API access, all talk no action. A perfect example is there is this basic CRUD app that I rely upon and I see the current maintainer is working on all these feature requests, the problem for me is that the site has a ton of AJAX and takes like 20 mouse clicks to get retrieve basic information. So I open a ticket / feature request just to get a basic REST API for the reads and they politely tell me I am an idiot and close the request. So much pointless work is created at Amazon from lack of API access.

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#99

Post by whatever1 »

xyzelement wrote: post #94
yosamino wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did we end up in a place where we demand the system of government be democratic, with all the emotional language of freedom, self-determination and so on. And then we carved out an exception and made it so our places where we work are run as oppressive dictatorships... Dont agree with what the bossman said?: "You're fired!" And the people love it so much, they even democratically elected the poster child of that…

// And then we carved out an exception and made it so our places where we work are run as oppressive dictatorships... That's just a bunch of random words you're saying. Reality: we're building a company so we can create wealth and support our families and achieve something. We have a plan for doing it. If you're not following the plan and just sabotaging everything, you're doing exactly that - sabotaging. This is dif…

Famous last words before Boeing green lighting the faulty MCAS system (against engineering warnings) that killed multiple hundreds of people?

Dictatorships are great when the leader is perfect. Problem is that they never are.

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