Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

An internal Google post, accidentally made public, in which Yegge compared Amazon and Google's approaches to internal architecture — and found Google wanting. The centrepiece is the "Bezos mandate": Jeff Bezos's decree that all teams must expose their functionality through service interfaces, with no exceptions, and that anyone who does not comply will be fired. Yegge argued that this mandate is what made Amazon Web Services possible, while Google's failure to think in platforms explained why its products felt disconnected. Five thousand words that influenced how an entire generation of engineers and architects thought about internal APIs, service-oriented architecture, and the organisational preconditions for platforms. The essay remains more cited than most published books on software architecture.