Lorcan Dempsey, whose Blog is a thing of wonder, pointed me to this riveting Conversation with Werner Vogels – Amazon’s CTO on the thinking which led to the company’s transformation from online bookstore to e-commerce juggernaut. The conversation is with Jim Gray, a Microsoft Technical Fellow and should be required reading for anyone responsible for scaling up online services.
Lorcan also spotted an important aspect of the Amazon S3 storage service that I’d missed when I blogged it.
One interesting feature was the absence of a feature – the user interface. It did not have its own user interface: it is available only through machine interfaces. One of these is BitTorrent. So it is built from the start as a network service, a service that other applications communicate with.