The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon

Post by eigen-vector » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 11:14 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #132

eigen-vector wrote: post #84

This was not exactly a Jeff Bezos mandate but the result of an engineering brainstorm. The mandate came more out of a "how to scale Amazon for the next decade" discussion. In large companies, one where distributed/independent teams are as important as distributed systems this ended up being the only way to operate. Initially, during the good old days of Amazon, there was what you'd call a single datawarehouse. It mad…

Ok, we'll take Bezos out of the title above.

Post by triceratops » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 11:25 PM UTC

xyzzyz wrote: post #56

defen wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google has worked this way since time immemorial. Do internal Google services exclusively use the Google Cloud Platform APIs? The implication is that internal Amazon services exclusively use AWS APIs. I've never worked at either company though, so I don't know if it's true. Perhaps someone could clarify.

No, because internal APIs for the same backends are more powerful and easier to integrate with. It's not easy to make the external APIs as useful and powerful as internal ones: for one, you can trust your users more to do the right thing and not try to exploit you for profit, it's much less committment to offer certain functionalities, since it's easier to roll them back if only users are internal, etc. Google is slo…

Post by throwaway40324 » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 11:37 PM UTC

throwaway122kk wrote: post #106

thaeli wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some methods I've commonly seen in Enterprise Duct Tape: Screen scrape the other service and do data exchange via a Selenium script. Directly interact with the other service's database. CSV files and nightly batch jobs.

I raise you a service which gets it's configuration from a table on confluence page

Post by Waterluvian » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 11:40 PM UTC

kokey wrote: post #100

BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon Musk did this fairly recently at Tesla: "There are two schools of thought about how information should flow within companies. By far the most common way is chain of command, which means that you always flow communication through your manager. The problem with this approach is that, while it serves to enhance the power of the manager, it fails to serve the company. Instead of a problem getting solved quickly, whe…

Information doesn't have to flow through managers specifically and it certainly doesn't have to flow up the management chain and down again, but there ideally should be preferred funnels for the communication and breaking out of it should be an exception, or pre arranged, and not the norm. Otherwise you'll have, say, a particularly useful person on a team see his time filled with requests coming from a lot of differe…

Post by flukus » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 11:59 PM UTC

jhallenworld wrote: post #110

leoh wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do services talk to each other without an API? Is it something like "put a non-well-documented object into a queue?"

IBM has an appliance for you: https://www.ibm.com/products/datapower-gateway It's a middleware appliance that allows any API to talk to any other API and handles just about any data format. You can script it with javascript or XSLT. It can handle ad-hoc things like ftp polling. It has the added benefit that you can add security for outside facing clients. Disclaimer: I helped develop this appliance (but I no longer w…