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Comment by 7952 | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't there an edict that amazon internal services have to be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. So even internal technology is designed with being customer facing in mind.

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There is no mandate that I'm aware of (not that I know everything about everything), but it's definitely the case that projects with "externalization potential" (making up a phrase out of thin air) will generally be more likely to get funded and prioritized (of course, why wouldn't they be preferred?).

So, even without a mandate, the market forces at play in terms of proposing roadmap projects and choosing what to invest in, will naturally tend to favor those solutions with can pull double-duty (solve an immediate problem/pain-point that Amazon already has, and with a clear path/potential to be converted into or evolve into an external sell-able service too).

Here is Bezos' mandate from 2002. Quite prescient: https://jesusgilhernandez.com/2012/10/18/jeff-bezos-mandate-...

It's a little different from the idea of "all services must be something we can turn around and sell to customers", but yes it was a good idea to enforce service interfaces and forbid tight coupling at a architectural level.

I think this is what you are referring to[1]. I don't think the goal is making everything externizable, I think the goal is just to have good api's everywhere. Easy productization is a side effect.

[1] https://medium.com/slingr/what-year-did-bezos-issue-the-api-...

Does than mandate predate the creation of AWS?

According to the Yegge rant, it was some time around 2001/2002/2003, so yes.

https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

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