https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesv...
His Big Mandate went something along these lines:
1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.
5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.
7) Thank you; have a nice day!
Now it has meant that Amazon can transition internal infrastructure into external AWS infrastructure and charge for it.
It really is genius and wouldn't surprise me if this becomes the future of how enterprise companies develop software.
I'd say it's more of a problem with frameworks as they exist today. I'd like to see a movement to REST API service frameworks with some level of cooperation to get compatibility for standard client libraries.
Everything then gets built around services: from static site generation to single-page apps, third-party developer APIs to admin interfaces. Then you'd have flexibility to replace any piece of the architecture, whether to get better to performance from a service or to use the latest JS single-page app framework.