February 23: Decoupling at Amazon

A look at how well-documented, hardened APIs helped Amazon tech teams collaborate and complete projects faster.

Source: Harvard Business School (21:45)
Published: September 2020

Decoupling at Amazon

“When I was working as Jeff’s technical advisor, we decided that projects weren’t moving forward fast enough. The root cause was that our software was too coupled. If you wanted to build something that required multiple teams, it was a project for each technical team involved. It was hard to manage!

We decided that we wanted instead for each technology team to take their technology and build well-documented, hardened APIs so that teams can collaborate without ever having to talk to each other. It took us years to do this but, once complete, we moved [and innovated] at a much faster rate.”

- Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services

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