There is no mandate that I'm aware of (not that I know everything about everything), but it's definitely the case that projects with "externalization potential" (making up a phrase out of thin air) will generally be more likely to get funded and prioritized (of course, why wouldn't they be preferred?).

So, even without a mandate, the market forces at play in terms of proposing roadmap projects and choosing what to invest in, will naturally tend to favor those solutions with can pull double-duty (solve an immediate problem/pain-point that Amazon already has, and with a clear path/potential to be converted into or evolve into an external sell-able service too).

Here is Bezos' mandate from 2002. Quite prescient: https://jesusgilhernandez.com/2012/10/18/jeff-bezos-mandate-...

It's a little different from the idea of "all services must be something we can turn around and sell to customers", but yes it was a good idea to enforce service interfaces and forbid tight coupling at a architectural level.

I think this is what you are referring to[1]. I don't think the goal is making everything externizable, I think the goal is just to have good api's everywhere. Easy productization is a side effect.

[1] https://medium.com/slingr/what-year-did-bezos-issue-the-api-...

Does than mandate predate the creation of AWS?

According to the Yegge rant, it was some time around 2001/2002/2003, so yes.

https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611