The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

by Gene Kim

Vogels notes, “The big architectural change that Amazon went through in the past five years [from 2001–2005] was to move from a two-tier monolith to a fully-distributed, decentralized, services platform serving many different applications. A lot of innovation was necessary to make this happen, as we were one of the first to take this approach.” The lessons from Vogel’s experience at Amazon that are important to our understanding of architecture shifts include the following: Lesson 1: When applied rigorously, strict service orientation is an excellent technique to achieve isolation; you achieve a level of ownership and control that was not seen before. Lesson 2: Prohibiting direct database access by clients makes performing scaling and reliability improvements to your service state possible without involving your clients. Lesson 3: Development and operational process greatly benefits from switching to service-orientation. The services model has been a key enabler in creating teams that can innovate quickly with a strong customer focus. Each service has a team associated with it, and that team is completely responsible for the service—from scoping out the functionality to architecting, building, and operating it.