PUBLIC MARKS with tags webservices & amazon

Jeff Bezos' Risky Bet Amazon's CEO wants to run your business with the technology behind his Web site. But Wall street wants him to mind the store

At the core of the Amazon strategy are the Web Services. The Amazon team takes the concepts of search, storage, lookup and management the data and turns them into pay-per-fetch and pay-per-space web services. This is a brilliant strategy and Amazon is certainly a visionary company. But what impresses me the most as an engineer is their ability to take very complex problems, solve them and then shrink wrap their solutions with a simple and elegant API. Eat your own dog food Perhaps the most admirable thing about the Amazon efforts is that they are productizing their own infrastructure. It may not be widely known, but Amazon.com itself runs on all these services. The blocks that comprise the biggest store on Earth are servicing each other! For example, the site relies on eCommerce service and the Simple Storage Service. The lack of the real customer feedback is a notorious problem in software engineering. The gap between the what software engineer thinks is useful and what the real customers want is a lot of times just hard to bridge. And how do you solve this problem for something like Amazon Web Services? Amazon's answer - turn ½ of the company to be the customers of the other half. This 'eat your own dog motto' forces the Web Services strategy on the success path. Failure is just simply not an option, since it is going to undermine the operations of the main business.

Ruby/Amazon is a Ruby language library that allows programmatic access to the popular Amazon Web site via the REST (XML over HTTP) based Amazon Web Services. In addition to the original amazon.com site, the amazon.co.uk, amazon.de, amazon.fr, amazon.ca, and amazon.co.jp properties are also supported.

note to self: play with A9 someday