SQL is also an API.

the reason he did that was for business reasons. He wanted to be able to expose any part of the stack as a public service to external customers, and vice versa, to let his internal service compete against the publicly available ones.

But this is only valid when you're trying to build AWS. Not everyone does that.

Relational databases have extensive permission systems for a reason.

The distributed computing manifesto for Amazon is from 1998. Jeff was not thinking about those things then. And wouldn’t for 5 more years.

> Providing access to other services is what APIs are for.

Yeah, and databases expose extensive APIs with extremely battle-tested security and permissions models for multiple consumers.

That’s why your bank lets you connect directly to their database to see your transaction history.