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by lightbendover 1265 days ago
Amazon is a good example of a huge organization absolutely crippled by micro-service fiefdoms driven by sr.mgr whims and not strong technical guidance from such PEs.
2 comments

Depends entirely on the org. My org actually broke SOA (thousands of services and some intense technical debt) and is now in a years long process of moving toward a centralized service orchestration model. This couldn’t have happened without PE, Sr PE and DE involvement.
Now that sounds interesting. I assume you're not counting each API endpoint as a service, so can you shed any more light on this? The scale sounds mind-boggling. Thousands of separate services being pulled (more) together. Can you give an idea of the size or scope of these services?
>1000 services, each with many APIs :)

Amazon's warehouses have incredible domain complexity which drives the complexity of the software architecture. It's also one of the oldest parts of the company with a direct lineage going back 20+ years. (for example, our inventory databases still have the same schema and are still using a RDBMS, albeit RDS Postgres instead of Oracle).

About five years ago we started rearchitecting to a centralized orchestration service which is being used to abstract this complexity from process teams. This is to avoid projects where 20+ service teams must be engaged just to launch a new solution.

And look how much damage it's done to their business.