[bhupy]

I recommend reading Steve Yegge's (in)famous "Platforms Rant". https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

The conventional understanding is that AWS was a top-down mandate by a prescient Bezos way ahead of its time, and that vision ultimately paid off.

[foobarian]

I never saw a corroborating, or adding more detail source for Yegge's post, and I wonder if this wasn't Bezos himself talking. I think someone put him up to it.

[NOGDP]

This uncorroborated story is not 'conventional understanding'. It doesn't even demonstrate any link to AWS vision or architecture. Service oriented architectures existed years before this mythical memo and AWS didn't exist until years later. This memo reads like a Steve Jobs parody - just blatantly attributing all major tech and architectural decisions to Jeff's genius and foresight.

[ra7]

> just blatantly attributing all major tech and architectural decisions to Jeff's genius and foresight.

In a thread that is attributing all of SpaceX and Tesla's technical achievements to Elon Musk's genius and foresight...

[philwelch]

The mandate Yegge alludes to in the “platforms rant” is to adopt a service-oriented architecture, not to build a cloud services provider.