[scarface74]

Which has nothing to do with

This was Bezos' reasoning for making as much of their internal software available to the public via AWS

Those APIs had nothing to do with AWS. So how was the original poster not talking about AWS when they mentioned AWS?

Also a clean public interface says nothing about how badly written and documented the underlying code is.

[mavhc]

I'm using AWS to mean the 212 different cloudy services they offer, not the original compute and storage products

[scarface74]

No Amazon retail doesn’t develop a service internally and turn it over to AWS so they can sell it to customers. AWS treats Amazon Retail as just another customer that sometimes gets access to services before they are made publicly available. They talk about this all of the time at reinvent.

[mavhc]

I mean Amazon as a whole, not specifically the retail arm. Wasn't the point that every internal service should be able to be productised? This was much later than when AWS was started.

[scarface74]

So I guess I should disclose this now. I work as an implementation consultant (not my official title but it’s more descriptive - I actually do hands on keyboard coding) at AWS. But I’m just as far removed from the going ons between AWS and Amazon retail as anyone on the outside. So I’m definitely not trying to do the “appeal to authority”.

The mandate was in 2001. AWS first launched in 2006. From reading the letter, it wasn’t about being able to make services productizable. It was more so teams could work independently and choose whichever underlying technology they wanted. It also prevents the issue the original poster was having. It’s much easier to make changes to a small API than a monolith.

It takes a lot to go from internal API to product even on a small scale. Werner Vogels said at the last Reinvent that S3 is made you of hundred or more separate internal services exposed internally via an API. My last company we also had a mandate to be “API first”. Not because we were trying to be like Amazon with less than 75 people, but we actually sold access to our APIs to our customers - large business that used them as the backend for their websites and mobile apps. We also used the APIs internally for our websites and large ETL jobs where sour clients would send us files for bulk changes.