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

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#121

Post by res0nat0r » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 3:33 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #115

amazondrone12 wrote: post #98

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 g…

Sounds like they're allowing people to treat the systems as "infrastructure" and "applications" with only the infra having exposed APIs? That's super common in software of all sorts. There are a lot of people who can make good use of a decent API and appreciate it, but are not experienced (or smart, or have time, etc) enough to design a good API themselves. Most software is mortar, not bricks.

Most all of the time wasting or hacky things like this there are just because people don't have time to improve things they scraped together to provide value somewhere.

Everyone at AWS ran around with their heads cut off back when there were 6 regions because everyone was so overworked or had to drop everything they were doing for a week because a new Xen bug was published to the email list and would go out of embargo at the end of the week. I can only imagine how insane it is now with ~20 regions to support.

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#122

Post by jjeaff » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 3:34 PM UTC

adolph wrote: post #36

meowface wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Otherwise: Later versions of the Hydra story add a regeneration feature to the monster: for every head chopped off, the Hydra would regrow two heads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lernaean_Hydra

>Heracles required the assistance of his nephew Iolaus to cut off all of the monster's heads and burn the neck using a sword and fire.

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#123

Post by beastman82 » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 3:45 PM UTC

sgt101 wrote: post #105

I worked at a company that read the Amazon memo virtually straight after it was published and decided to copy it. The CIO at the time predicated every system's teams' bonus on it. No API, no bonus. What followed was 18mths of people building enterprise messaging systems and "buses" of various types. Hundreds of pages of documentation on APIs was prepared and released. I think 2 API's with maybe 40 methods actually we…

That is quite the conclusion you've made from a single data point!

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#124

Post by tomtato » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

I had always read this as a metaphorical memo. Not necessarily that every team must have a software service running somewhere in infrastructure serving RESTful routes but rather as a way of thinking about agreements between groups. Your team's "API" could be documents describing: if you want us to do XYZ, send us a request via ABC, and you should expect a response in UVW format in x amount of time.

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#125

Post by tome » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 4:50 PM UTC

Gayax wrote: post #89

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!

I came across an interesting blog discussing such ideas a few years ago. I don't think anything ever came of it though http://thingamy.typepad.com/

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#126

Post by wly_cdgr » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 4:59 PM UTC

Like all the best myth making propaganda this has some sense and truth to it

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#127

Post by philwelch » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 8:08 PM UTC

markwkw wrote: post #32

It's interesting and often missed that this strategy implies a view of human collaboration and organization. Note that the memo says: 'All teams... Teams must... ...another team’s data store...'. It seems that someone figured out that a (5-10 person?) team is the right human collective size to design and build useful stuff, but that collective shall expose what they build to other teams via APIs. It's fine for the te…

It’s a form of using Conway’s Law to your own advantage instead of living in denial of it or treating it as an antipattern.

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#128

Post by philwelch » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 8:14 PM UTC

jayd16 wrote: post #54

>It doesn’t matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter. So how does Amazon manage this btw? I don't find AWS SDKs to be all that consistent or inconsistent. They are usually good _enough_. Is that all it takes? By contrast, Google seems to spend a lot of time on their single repo, build the world, approach. For the most part it seems beloved, or at least people try to recr…

When I worked at Amazon there was a framework similar to gRPC for internal API’s. This was a few years before gRPC was released and the framework was already a few years old at this point.

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#129

Post by xyzelement » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 8:57 PM UTC

goodpoint wrote: post #116

xyzelement wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

// 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…

> we're building a company so we can create wealth and support our families Whose families? Most private companies state very clearly that mission is to "maximize shareholder's value". That's the whole point of being privately owned. Hiring and paying employers is a necessary evil. That's why they need legal regulation, public supervision, even whistleblower employees.

All the people involved in the case at hand (building out Amazon's software paradigms) are highly paid, equity holding employees who have done quite well for themselves through this process.

Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

#130

Post by sgt101 » Mon, Jun 21, 2021, 9:07 PM UTC

beastman82 wrote: post #123

sgt101 wrote: post #105

I worked at a company that read the Amazon memo virtually straight after it was published and decided to copy it. The CIO at the time predicated every system's teams' bonus on it. No API, no bonus. What followed was 18mths of people building enterprise messaging systems and "buses" of various types. Hundreds of pages of documentation on APIs was prepared and released. I think 2 API's with maybe 40 methods actually we…

That is quite the conclusion you've made from a single data point!

Well - you can argue about the opposite as well!

But I would claim that this is an existence proof - if the management will and focus is there for an API enabled business (it was) this case study proves that is not sufficient to create the kind of company that Amazon became. An API program isn't a magic bullet (as everyone knows by now I guess!)