The answer turned out to be keeping the code and the teams together. As Amazon split the organization up into small teams, they also kept carving up the code into small pieces so the teams could “take it with them” and operate it independently. These teams and their respective code needed a way to talk to each other, and “web services” turned out to be the answer. Instead of each team shipping code into some giant repository that somebody else would deploy and run on servers, each team would run their own code as a service that other teams could interoperate with. Because each team was small,
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