This is a wonderfully informative Amazon update based on Joachim Rohde’s discovery of an interview with Amazon’s CTO. You’ll learn about how Amazon organizes their teams around services, the CAP theorem of building scalable systems, how they deploy software, and a lot more. Many new additions from the ACM Queue article have also been included.
Amazon grew from a tiny online bookstore to one of the largest stores on earth. They did it while pioneering new and interesting ways to rate, review, and recommend products. Greg Linden shared is version of Amazon’s birth pangs in a series of blog articles.
Information Sources
Early Amazon by Greg Linden
How Linux saved Amazon millions
Interview Werner Vogels – Amazon’s CTO
Asynchronous Architectures – a nice summary of Werner Vogels’ talk by Chris Loosley
Learning from the Amazon technology platform – A Conversation with Werner Vogels
Werner Vogels’ Weblog – building scalable and robust distributed systems
Platform
Linux
Oracle
C++
Perl
Mason
Java
Jboss
Servlets
The Stats
More than 55 million active customer accounts.
More than 1 million active retail partners worldwide.
Between 100-150 services are accessed to build a page.
The Architecture
What is it that we really mean by scalability? A service is said to be scalable if when we increase the resources in a system, it results in increased performance in a manner proportional to resources added. Increasing performance in general means serving more units of work, but it can also be to handle larger units of work, such as when datasets grow.
The big architectural change that Amazon made was to move from a two-tier monolith to a fully-distributed, decentralized, services platform serving many different applications.
Started as one application talking to a back end. Written in C++.
(continue reading…)
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