In the engineering department, employees were constantly trying to fix a technical infrastructure that was now an aging, sprawling mess. The company had outgrown the original framework devised by Shel Kaphan in the 1990s, the monolithic code base dubbed Obidos that for years was held together by what Amazon executive Werner Vogels later called “duct tape and WD40 engineering.”4 And when Amazon cloned its clunky code base to run the websites of Target and Borders, those deals were lucrative but they magnified the company’s infrastructure problems. Instead of fighting flames emanating from a
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even big compnies hit walls
