The Distributed Computing Manifesto | All Things Distributed

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels sharing the original writeup from 1998 that set Amazon's architecture in place to scale 10x from where they were.

Back in 1998, a collective of senior Amazon engineers started to lay the groundwork for a radical overhaul of Amazon’s architecture to support the next generation of customer centric innovation. A core point was separating the presentation layer, business logic and data, while ensuring that reliability, scale, performance and security met an incredibly high bar and keeping costs under control. Their proposal was called the Distributed Computing Manifesto.

This line in the document made me chuckle.

Currently much of our database access is ad hoc with a proliferation of Perl scripts that to a very real extent run our business.

A lot of technologists that have been in growing businesses have seen that!

This thinking was not default 25 years ago. The SOA patterns were only just starting to emerge then. I have no doubt that this pattern, and the realization of it in their software, was one of the biggest enablers to their continued growth.