November 28: Distributed Computing Manifesto

A 6-pager from senior Amazon engineers in 1998.

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Source: Werner Vogels
Published: November 2022

Distributed Computing Manifesto

In 1998 Amazon’s business grew 300% year over year to $610 million of revenue. 

Anticipating future growth, senior engineers at the company wrote a 6-page narrative describing how Amazon’s architecture would need a radical overhaul to support 10x the order volume.

The change? A monolithic system architecture (called Obidos) to a service-oriented architecture. Amazon would separate the presentation layer, the business logic, and the data.

“The concepts in this document shaped what we see in microservices and event driven architectures.” - Werner Vogels

Bonus: The concept for "two-pizza teams" came from this architectural change. Amazon broke down the organization into small, autonomous teams focus on a specific service that powered the Amazon bookstore.

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