Here is a report on a recent speech by Vogels on the Amazon system:
<<For architects who believe detailed advanced planning will be the
key to a successful SOA implementation, an alternative approach is
offered by Werner Vogels, vice president, world-wide architecture and
CTO at Amazon.com.
"Amazon does a lot of research, but we don't call it research, we call
it development," Vogels said in a keynote at the opening the Gartner
Inc. Enterprise Architecture Summit this week. He offered an almost
anti-model for SOA development that includes hard work, failures, more
hard work, successes and more hard work.
He laced his presentation with tongue-in-cheek humor starting with the
title: "Order in the Chaos: Building the Amazon.com Platform."
Vogels pointed out that in 1995 when Amazon started with a simple Web
ordering application running on a single server, the architecture was
so simple it was literally drawn on a cocktail napkin. There was no
grand plan to build an SOA platform that today features as many as 150
Web services on its home page alone.
The massive online retail Web site evolved from a modest attempt to
sell books on the Web, into this year's version that hosts 1 million
merchant partners ranging from small used book stores to Target Inc.,
which in virtual retailing is now bigger than Wal-Mart, Vogels said.
"We more or less naturally became a platform," Vogels said of the
technological evolution.
In a brief history of Amazon's technology, he showed how one server
for databases of customer information and inventory grew to two
servers, one for customer info and one for inventory. As the business
got bigger with more customers and more products, more and more
database servers were added.
When database performance became an problem, a fast talking salesman
told Amazon to buy a mainframe. Big iron did not prove to be the
answer, a technology misstep that still leaves Vogels chagrined.
"This is an Internet company in 1999 and we bought a mainframe," he
said. When it failed to meet the scalability, reliability and
performance needs after a year, Amazon pulled the plug on that hardware.
Vogels said there is a lot of talk about what is the "secret sauce"
that makes Amazon so popular. In his opinion, "The secret sauce is
operating reliably at scale."
To serve its 60 million customers and keeping them all happy requires
scalability and reliability, that may go beyond what most SOA
developers and architects need to factor into their platforms, Vogels
said. For example, while most customers may feel they're buying a lot
of stuff if they have 20 books and gadgets in their online shopping
cart, he said Amazon has to be prepared for the one customer in 60
million with 20,000 items in their shopping cart.
After the mainframe debacle in 1999, Amazon reached the point around
2001 where the only way to achieve the reliability and scalability it
needed was to use Web services to insulate the databases from being
overwhelmed by direct interaction with online applications.
"We were doing SOA before it was a buzz word," the Amazon CTO said.
Unlike most speakers at analyst conferences, Vogels doesn't mince
words as to whether SOA is a good strategy or a workable theory.
Upfront, he told his audience "Service orientation works."
For all the talk of how Amazon is succeeding with blade servers
running Linux, the CTO says, "We never could have built that platform
without service orientation."
Giving a glimpse into how the developers at Amazon are organized,
Vogels said it involves teamwork. Each Web service has one team of
developers responsible for it. And they are not just responsible for
writing the service and then tossing it over the wall for testing and
eventual entry into production where some poor maintenance geek has to
look after it.
The Amazon CTO tells his Web services team members: "You build it. You
own it."
That means the team is responsible for its Web service's on-going
operation. If a Web service stops working in the middle of the night,
team members are called to fix it.
This policy that there is "no wall at the end of development"
encourages developers to make their Web services as bulletproof as
possible.
Since complexity is notoriously the enemy of reliability, Vogels
encourages developers to keep their Web services simple.
"Simplicity is the hardest design criteria," Vogels said. "Designing a
service we ask constantly: Is this the simplest service we can build?"
Another design criterion the chief technology officer emphasizes is
not getting attached to any one technology or standard. Amazon
developers start with what the customer needs and then work back to
what technology will work for them, Vogels said.
This includes the implementation of Web services standards. If one
retail partner wants to use SOAP and another wants to use
Representational State Transfer (REST), they each get the standard
they request.
"Our developers don't care if it's REST or SOAP," Vogels said. "It's
all about customers.">>
You can find this at:
<http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid26_gci1195702,00.html?track=NL-110&ad=556382>
Gervas
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