I've seen statements that AWS wasn't actually used for Amazon own needs (in the beginning) and was developed by a different team at least a couple of times, here on HN and elsewhere. Were these rumors false?
Steve Yegge's famous essay covers it quite well, I think: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX
> So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.
His Big Mandate went something along these lines:
1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.
5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.
7) Thank you; have a nice day!From what I hear, they are now used pretty extensively internally (and that may have been an end goal)
Btw, even without a perliminary big customer at start, when it started, AWS offered a phenomenal and unique capability for developers, that price didn't matter(to an extent), and hence scale probably didn't matter much.
So i'm not sure if this "big customer" theory is correct.