A Second Conversation with Werner Vogels
When I joined Amazon in 1998, the company had a single US-based website selling only books and running a monolithic C application on five servers, a handful of Berkeley DBs for key/value data, and a relational database. That database was called "ACB" which stood for "Amazon.Com Books," a name that failed to reflect the range of our ambition. In 2006 acmqueue published a conversation between Jim Gray and Werner Vogels, Amazon's CTO, in which Werner explained that Amazon should be viewed not just as an online bookstore but as a technology company. In the intervening 14 years, Amazon's distributed systems, and the patterns used to build and operate them, have grown in influence. In this follow-up conversation, Werner and I pay particular attention to the lessons to be learned from the evolution of a single distributed system, S3, which was publicly launched close to the time of that 2006 conversation.
Tom Killalea In your keynote at the AWS re:Invent conference in December 2019, you said that in March 2006 when it launched, S3 (Simple Storage Service) was made up of eight services, and by 2019 it was up to 262 services. As I sat there I thought that's a breathtaking number, and it struck me that very little has been written about how a large-scale, always-on service evolves over a very extended period of time. That's a journey that would be of great interest to our software practitioner community. This is evolution at a scale that is unseen and certainly hasn't been broadly discussed.
