Alex Barnett blog : Amazon

Platform Thinking

alexbarnett — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:41:00 GMT

(am republishing this blog post as it automagically disappeared in a server upgrade I did recently, originally posted 13.10.2011)

Last night I came across a rant from a Google employee (that was accidentally made public via Google+...doh!,) that provided not only good popcorn munching material, but I thought had some pretty interesting insights around what it really means to be a "Platform" company, not just a "Product" company.

It's pretty dense stuff, but wanted to call out the snippet about the "mandate" that Jeff Bezos sent around the company back in 2002.

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!

Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.

then...

Over the next couple of years, Amazon transformed internally into a service-oriented architecture. They learned a tremendous amount while effecting this transformation. There was lots of existing documentation and lore about SOAs, but at Amazon’s vast scale it was about as useful as telling Indiana Jones to look both ways before crossing the street.

...Organizing into services taught teams not to trust each other in most of the same ways they’re not supposed to trust external developers.

This effort was still underway when I left to join Google in mid-2005, but it was pretty far advanced. From the time Bezos issued his edict through the time I left, Amazon had transformed culturally into a company that thinks about everything in a services-first fashion. It is now fundamental to how they approach all designs, including internal designs for stuff that might never see the light of day externally.

At this point they don’t even do it out of fear of being fired. I mean, they’re still afraid of that; it’s pretty much part of daily life there, working for the Dread Pirate Bezos and all. But they do services because they’ve come to understand that it’s the Right Thing. There are without question pros and cons to the SOA approach, and some of the cons are pretty long. But overall it’s the right thing because SOA-driven design enables Platforms.

Nowadays, it might be considered conventional wisdom for "Platform Thinking", but to truly embracing this philosophy - and make it real - first requires the realization that in the long term, Platform companies beat Product companies every time. Realizing that, then Platform Thinking and Platform Doing should become second nature. The brilliance of Bezos was to realize this strategic insight long before web APIs became as popular as they have become.

Redmonk, Guinness and random stuff

alexbarnett — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:58:00 GMT

In San Francisco last night, catching up with the Redmonk folks celebrating their 5th birthday (thanks to James for inviting me). Caught up with some industry legends - Steve Gillmor, Chris Messina, Dan Farber and Ryan Stewart, and made some new friends there too, e.g. Ed Hermannn - the guy who created Wii interface into an SAP app). .The Guinness is good at the Shields.

Right, so here's a bunch of random stuff that's been capturing my attention the last week.

Firstly - weird:

Synthetic Biology: The conclusion of the very beginning
"The question is not so much whether synthetic biology will remake society, but who will be in control when it does."
Contact Lens or Computer Display?
Augmented reality - here we come.
Jedi Ginsu Knife Brings Out the Chef/Jedi in You [Lightsabers]
I want one of these.

Next - wow:

Amazon Web Services Make Earnings News
“Over 330,000 developers have registered to use Amazon Web Services (AWS), up more than 30,000 from last quarter."
Amazon Earnings Call Details: Web Services Use Up More Bandwidth Than Amazon.com
"startups and other companies using Amazon’s Web-scale computing infrastructure now bigger collectively than Amazon."

Next, next - quite right:

YouTubers given share of ad cash
Share the love (and the cash).

~~Next, next, next~~ - useful:

UI-patterns.com
via ksharkey: "The purpose of this site is over time to fill some of the gaps - especially by providing code examples as to how how the different patterns can be implemented: to join theory with practice."
Short Bits: CableCARD, Beta Testing
links to everything you wanted to know (and can never know) about the nightmare that is CableCard (I need to angrily rant on this topic one day)

What I'm reading...

alexbarnett — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 17:06:00 GMT

There are a whole bunch of interesting posts / stuff I find on the net that I bookmark on del.icio.us (at least, I think they are interesting). Over the years I've been experimenting with different ways of sharing these with you. My most recent solution has been to include my del.icio.us links within my feed as seperate items. The problem with this approach is I haven't had a permalinked way of publishing these to my blog with a way to easily edit prior to publishing...also, having the daily summaries del.icio.us format in a feed is lame.

So I going to try something new. Instead of having the daily del.icio.us link summaries published as RSS items within my Feedburner feed, I'm going to publish these as blog posts. It should make things more economical from the consumption point of view (I don't think the "Links for 2008-01-20 [del.icio.us]" blah blah feed item titles are pretty). To do this, I have:

disabled the del.icio.us feed syndication from Feedburner (the Link Splicer)
have installed Josh Leggard's Insert Feed Content plugin for Windows Live Writer - this lets me populate a draft blog post with the latest items from any feed (my del.icio.us feed in this case - I'll still use the service for bookmarking) that I can then include / edit / add more commentary before I post to my blog - along with a custom post title.

Better me thinks. I like Harry Pierson's and Assaf's Labnotes style of providing links with commentary...over time I hope to emulate these.

So here goes - this first effort will be larger than future posts like this...shorter in the future.

OpenID - Getting Traction

Telegraph to become OpenID provider
"The Telegraph will soon become the first newspaper in the world, and the first British media company, to become an OpenID provider."
Yahoo! Announces Support for OpenID; Users Able to Access Multiple Internet Sites with Their Yahoo! ID
Sweet!
Stories we want to see in 2008
"Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Endorse Support OpenID and OAuth"

Cool UI / Vizualization and Useful Bits

external hard disk treemap
"an external hard disk that shows the content of the hard disk on its outside skin."
Fascinating new way of entering text
"Dasher is a really fascinating interface that allows you to write by browsing through letters using a finger, mouse or some other pointing devise."
How Does FeedDemon Calculate Attention?
Nick Bradbury: "FeedDemon's algorithm for determining a feed's attention rank has changed since I first wrote about it, but it's still very simple."
using delicious on your iphone
Perfect. All I need is an iPhone now.
wmIRC.com - IRC client for Windows Mobile Smartphone and Pocket PC / Phone Edition
"IRC for when you're on the move."

SaaS Stuff

Scalable Media Hosting with Amazon S3
Amazon S3 101.
How to package up the SaaS platform
Phil Wainwright: "Sun’s intervention gives MySQL’s open source database an aura of greater enterprise readiness than it previously had, backed up by fully accountable support offered on a traditional commercial basis."
Updates to URI Syntax in Dec 2007 ADO.NET Data Services CTP
Astoria gets URI syntax updates.
The Idea of Software as a Service Platform
I still don’t see desktop GIS being replaced by web services anytime soon.
600 Web APIs
Programmable Web's 600 web APIs.
Enter the Internet Cloud
"The Internet cloud [is] where the distributed and programmable network of services across the globe will serve all the data, resources and functionality we will ever use." Good quote ;-)
Your Data in the Cloud - URL-based computing, SimpleDB, Astoria, etc.
Michael Cote: "the question for Astoria, SimpleDB, and all these “the non-relational database” databases isn’t so much a question of a good idea or not, but the way the technology is packaged and delivered."
12 predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2008
Dion Hinchcliffe on the worlds of SOA, SaaS, and Web 2.
Eight reasons SaaS will surge in 2008
Phil Wainwright: "The coming year is going to be a pivotal one for anyone involved in software-as-a-service."
The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google
New book by Nicholas Carr, author of Does IT Matter? "A hundred years ago, companies stopped producing their own power with steam engines and generators and plugged into the newly built electric grid." Next - everything software.
Is Red Hat's New Development Environment Destined for an Amazon or IBM Cloud?
Dana Gardner: "Tools in the clouds."

Developer Cults and Dataheads

Sriram Krishnan: Amazon SimpleDB - Technical Overview
"I love the data model for SimpleDB."
The Cults of Programming
"In my experience with various programmers over the years, I've realized that most of them fall into one of several cults which describe their behavior." Via Assaf.
Scaling Twitter: Making Twitter 10000 Percent Faster
How many of the 15 Twitter employees are dedicated to managing all this?
Eventual Consistency Is Not That Scary
"Get ahead of the curve and understand for your application what the consistency requirements will be."
Eventually Consistent
"Recently there has been a lot of discussion about the concept of eventual consistency in the context of data replication."
Make Money Fast - Introducing Amazon DevPay
"With DevPay, developers can focus on being creative and innovative while dispatching the less-than-glamorous aspects of dealing with bank accounts, credit cards, and so forth to us."
Facebook Right, Scoble Wrong: Social Network Interoperability and the O'Reilly Social Graph FOO Camp
Dare Obasanjo: "The data portability folks want to make it easy for you to jump from service to service."
ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) Transforms SQL Server into an Atom Store
Wow.
Rails 2.0: It's done!
Er, Rails 2.
Volta Fundamentals
Erik Meijer's latest. In essence Volta is a recompiler.

Uncategorizable But Good.

Lessons from Star Wars
Johnnie Moor's pointer: "Stephen Anderson shares his presentation about what designers can learn from the making of Star Wars."

8 Trends in Software as a Service Platforms

alexbarnett — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 17:40:00 GMT

To kick off the new year, I presented to around 40 or 50 members of Utah Technology Council (UTC) last week. The title of the topic they asked me to speak about was "Trends in Software as a Service Platforms". I searched around for some ideas and came across two recent posts predicting trends in SaaS for 2008, one by Phil Wainewright "Eight Reasons SaaS Will Surge in 2008" and Jeff Kaplan's post "Top Ten Reasons Why On-Demand Services in 2008". I decided to borrow liberally from these (thanks Phil and Jeff) and mash these two together (along with a couple of thoughts of my own) and present "8 Trends in Software as a Service Platforms" to an audience made up of CTOs and VPs of engineering and development for software companies in the Utah area.

In preparation for the presentation, my boss (Martin Plaehn) at Bungee Labs suggested I write up my presentation as notes blog them afterward, so here they are.

8 Trends in Software as a Service Platforms

SaaS is just part of the web mega-trend
Mainstream opinion says “Yes” to SaaS
Software vendors stampede into SaaS
All is being virtualized
Explosion of Web APIs
Economic factors favor SaaS
Enterprise and SMB IT embraces SaaS
SaaS platforms proliferate (PaaS)

1. SaaS is just part of the web mega-trend

Most of us have witnessed and many of us have been a part of the transformation in the way goods and services have been digitized, virtualized, delivered and consumed. Software, the data behind that software and the functionality that software provides is no different - software is subject to the very same transformational forces.

Just think about how even a class of product that is natively digital - such as software - has been transformed in the way it is delivered and consumed. For prosperity's sake, I've still got a few of those ZX81 software cassettes stashed away somewhere, gathering dust, looking ever more antiquated with each passing year. How will today's mode of software delivery and use look to us in a few years from now?

The web wants to connect things, and that's interesting. But connecting and interacting with "live" data, information and remote functionality make things more interesting.

At the fundamental level, the web connects things. It connects people to people, businesses to businesses, and people to businesses. Since the early 90's, the web has enabled the connection of so many things to so many other things at an ever accelerating rate, and yet we crave even more connectivity. But we increasingly also want the ability to interact with those things.

And it is the nature of these connected things that have changed since the early internet. The early web was good at connecting to static views of information and accessing limited and rigid functional services, very much a read-only mode. Then, as we learned a) the ability to read more dynamic-type information - at least regularly updated, and b) access richer remote functionality, we created whole new opportunities for ourselves. Next, we grew our ability read and write against dynamic, near real-time data and information and to program against remote functionality to create a new class of web applications leveraging those capabilities - and hence a new order of business and experiential opportunities have emerged. Some label this as "Web 2.0".

At its essence, it is the "liveness" of these real-time read-write data, information and functional sources available as "always on" services and the increasing ease to connect to, interact with - specifically change those resources available as live, programmable services that allows us to create new value out of those resources, opening up brand new market opportunities for businesses and the compelling, rich "live" end-user experiences of tomorrow.

2. Mainstream opinion says “Yes” to SaaS

Not surprisingly, Wall Street loves the the predictability of subscription services. It's good for cash flow, forecasting and business planning.

The venture firms also relish the opportunities that are opening up in a software as services-oriented economy. The ability to circumnavigate the incumbent software players with new disruptive technologies and propositions that are significantly easier to try and access for prospective customers compared to traditional software evaluation, along with usage and subscription-based business models verses the old licensing model makes investing in services-based software companies very compelling propositions from the venture firms' point of view. We should also see healthy M&A activity based on these similar opportunities in the coming year.

And then there's the trend for offshore / IT business process outsourcing. These providers will surely get in the game and make their plays through investments in and acquisitions of SaaS vendors that align well with their current core businesses.

Add to that the excitement we're reading about the SaaS space from the IT Analysts, journalists and bloggers, plus the new book by Nick Carr (author of “IT Doesn’t Matter”) - delivered by Amazon to me last week: “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google”. I think there's little doubt Carr's excellent analysis of the computing industry as an analogy to the electricity industry's shift to a utility model will be on business bestseller list for much of 2008. His messages resonates with corporate executives and end-users agree with him:

IT is a needless hassle,
it should be as easy as electricity and
be as reliable as a utility

3. Software vendors stampede into SaaS

The Big Software Players are following the early SaaS successes

CRM as a case in point. If you've been following the CRM software market, you'll know about the noises Oracle-Siebel, SAP and Microsoft started to make in the 2007 about what they are are lining up for the 2008 in terms of CRM as a service. Their efforts to emulate Salesforce.com's success delivering CRM as SaaS will be key strategic bets from the incumbents' point of view - and loud, price and functionally competitive propositions from the point of view of their existing and prospective customers.

CRM is just one of the multiple horizontal solution categories to transform from on-premise with traditional licensing model to a service-based delivery and subscription-based revenue model. ERP, supply chain, e-commerce, HR and many more...the horizontal solution list goes on. And then there are the vertical solution players...

Here's another data point to consider regarding the move by traditional software vendors to a SaaS model:

“15-20% of application ISVs have already either begun new skunk works initiatives or gained access to SaaS assets and development experience through M&A activity”
(Source: Key Trends in SaaS: 2008 and Beyond, Saugatuck Technology)

4. All is being virtualized

Virtualization is a technology trend.

Virtualization enables hardware as a service. The demand for virtual machines met by hypervisor software (VMWare, Xen, Hyper-V) and the success of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in the last couple of years point to a continuation of further virtualization of applications and hardware. Virtualization is accelerating the move from traditional on-premise software to services.

Virtualization is a business trend.

We continue to become a mobile workforce. The younger entrants into the workforce in service-oriented economies expect and want to be always connected. It's very hard work, if not impossible to get your traditional on-premise applications and centralized servers sitting behind a firewall to serve today's mobile workers. SaaS and managed services meet the needs square on.

5. The explosion of Web APIs is upon us

According to ProgrammableWeb.com, there are 559 commercial and public APIs available today, most of these are new and there are plenty more to come. How many will we see go live this year? And how many private web APIs are there and will be developed and consumed in the coming year?

Data from ProgrammableWeb.com

6. Economic factors favor SaaS

On-premise software requires upfront capital investments
To lower costs, many companies hold back on their capital investments to mitigate their risks, especially in recessions
Adopting on-demand services on a pay-as-you-go basis will be a perfect sourcing strategy for businesses seeking greater cost-controls and flexibility – the utility model

All well and good, but the real economic value of SaaS is that fact that it unleashes new value of previously isolated data silos and functionality.

7. Enterprise and SMB embraces SaaS

When it comes to IT, who doesn't like

Low-maintenance?
Low cost?
Low-resource profile?

IT and business folk like these things, and externally delivered SaaS applications deliver these benefits.

8. SaaS platforms proliferate (PaaS)

The more mainstream SaaS becomes the more the large vendors will be forced to offer effective platforms for ISVs, enterprises and SMBs.

If the move by the software vendors from traditional on-premise software to a services model is to be successful, they will need to provide programmable interfaces - not just end-user interfaces - to their services for their customers. Customers need and want the ability to access, intergrate and create new value out of live, programmable data, information and functionality living in the cloud. And in turn these same customers will want their custom-developed composite applications and integrated data available as programmable services - yet more APIs.

Customers want to unleash new value of previously isolated data silos and functionality through the development of their own applications programmed against those resources. And in turn these same customers will want their own custom-developed composite applications and newly integrated data available as end-user interfaces and as programmable services - yet more APIs. These customer needs will drive the software market to provide platforms to provide businesses and developers with with end-to-end:

programmable services and data integration
application development, testing and collaboration tools
deployment and scalable delivery

...all as a service with a utility model.

(hey...I needed to mentioned Bungee Connect just the once ;-).

2008 will mark a the proliferation of such offerings as "platforms as services" (or PaaS) through 2009, where then the consolidation will begin. Interesting SaaS and PaaS times ahead.

Update 2/20/2008: see "Time to Define "Platform as as Service" (PaaS)

The presentation seemed to go down pretty well and we had lots of interesting discussion throughtout. One of the topics we discussed was data security in a SaaS world. Don Kleinschnitz (VP, Development at Symantec) followed up with a mail linking to his blog covering Security 2.0 topics.

Again - thanks to Phil Wainewright and Jeff Kaplan for their post and to Martin for suggesting I blog this.

Podcast with John Musser of ProgrammableWeb.com

alexbarnett — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 16:38:00 GMT

A couple of weeks back John Musser of ProgrammableWeb.com joined me and Ted for a chat to discuss the state of web APIs and the API trends as he sees them.

We've now recorded the conversation and published as the first of a newly launched Bungee Line podcast series.

Topic covered include Facebook APIs, Amazon's recently launched Flexible Payment Service (FPS) , Google Base, Microsoft's Astoria and relational-data-in-the-cloud programming models and services, SaaS models and API SLAs, REST vs SOAP, "Closed is Still the Old Closed" and plenty more.

Thanks to John for his time.

Ozzie's "Cloud OS" Raises More Questions than Answers

alexbarnett — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 20:04:00 GMT

Ray Ozzie's briefing this week provided quite a bit more detail around Microsoft's "Software Plus Services" strategy. It's definitely worth a read (or a look, and if you're feeling too lazy for either you can read Nick Carr's summary).

It's been a year since Ozzie took over the role as Chief Software Architect from Bill Gates, and I think it is exciting to see his influence further emerge throughout the business, architectural and experential direction of Microsoft. The 30 year old company needs this injection - a shot in the arm. And his vision is the right one. It is the only one that has any chance of seeing Microsoft through its need for growth.

However, as the Ozzie's "Cloud OS" story slowly becomes more concrete, the future influence that Microsoft will have throughout the software and internet services ecosystem is becoming less clear.

Yes, we know Software as a Service (Saas) is becoming an increasingly significant trend, and we know that the enabling role Web Services (SOAP and REST based) has to play as part of the overall move to a distributed computing model is becoming ever more central, and we know that the browser will continue to further its dominance as the primary interface between humans and data, functionality and people, but what is not so clear is how many "major players" there will be in that future, what their roles will be, nor what the roles of the "everyone elses" will be.

Microsoft Partners have been assured a place by Microsoft's side in this future, but does anyone really know? How will all this fall out? How will Microsoft's traditional partner profile fit into Ozzie's new brave future? What kind of ecosystems will emerge? Will Microsoft's ecosystem of tomorrow look radically different to its ecosystem of today? Who are the Microsoft partners of today who will find themselves competing head-to-head with Microsoft tomorrow? What will Microsoft's competition of the future even look like?

The answers to some of these question may surprise us. How many people, for example, would have imagined a just few years ago that search engine providers or an online bookseller or online university network would emerge to become a serious potential competitor in the computing and software space of Microsoft? Not many. In the second internet age Microsoft's future competition and partners can literally come from any direction at any time. And they often do. In many respects, the future looks bright, but I suspect that for many in the software / computing industry the future is also very cloudy indeed.

Announcing Bungee Connect

alexbarnett — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 07:11:00 GMT

At last, I can tell you more about what Bungee Labs has been up to...

We've just announced details about Bungee Connect, a 100% on-demand web development and deployment environment that will be going into Beta phase in May.

Over the next three days at the Web 2.0 Expo 2007 and on bungeeconnect.com we'll be providing a lot more detail on exactly what Bungee Connect is, how it works and why we think it will be a big deal when we go live.

So before I go on, let me quote a couple of people who have already seen Bungee Connect in action behind closed doors. The following are from tonight's two press releases (1 and 2)

First off, Dion Hinchcliffe:

“Ajax is just the beginning of the RIA story and Bungee Labs provides the rest of the solution with a web-based IDE, on-demand scalable deployment, a well-designed community model and a built-in component ecosystem with real-world licensing options,” said Dion Hinchcliffe, ZDNet blogger; President/CTO, Hinchcliffe & Co.; and editor in chief, AjaxWorld Magazine. “Bungee Connect is a surprisingly complete one-stop shop for the RIA development, deployment and operations lifecycle.”

Next, Dana Gardner:

“Given the current disjointed state of tools, testing and deployment models, most developers find creating rich internet applications (RIAs) to be complex, time-consuming and expensive,” said Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions. “By combining development, testing and deployment functions into an integrated, low-cost-of-entry service approach, Bungee Connect both broadens the numbers of developers that can produce web applications as well as slashes the barriers of entry for creating innovative ecommerce services and web-based businesses."

The Bungee Labs team has been working very closely with the Amazon team (and others API providers) the last few months to make sure Amazon's web services "just work" with Bungee Connect. Jeff Barr, Senior Evangelist for Amazon's Web Services:

“Bungee Labs’ decision to make their development environment integrate seamlessly with Amazon Web Services is great news for our developer community,” said Jeff Barr, Senior Evangelist for Amazon Web Services. “AWS developers can now use Bungee Connect to directly access our services, which means they can build Web-Scale applications in an easy to use, browser-based development environment.”

Another provider of web APIs, Salesforce.com has also been working closely with the Bungee Labs engineers. This time a quote from Adam Gross, Vice President, Developer Marketing, Salesforce.com:

“Salesforce.com has demonstrated that the innovation and ideas of the consumer Internet are at the core of the next generation of business applications. Bungee Connect together with Salesforce.com’s Apex platform makes it easier for developers to create mashups for their businesses, and in doing so hastens the transition from traditional enterprise software to the new on-demand model of building and deploying applications.”

So, what is Bungee Connect? Well, it's a lot of things:

Bungee Connect is a completely web-based integrated development environment (IDE) for building and deploying rich Ajax web applications, from simple web apps to seriously sophisticated Ajax applications. No install for developers, no installation of delivery infrastructure, and no client install for end users.
Bungee Connect is for developers, not for consumers. Yes, it provides a huge amount of automated support for the integration of SOAP and REST-based web services, Ajax app development and state management. You can develop sophisticated apps that integrate powerful (as well as simple) web services plus develop your own logic without having to write a line of code. It massivley reduces complexity. But, nonetheless, it is for developers, not consumers.
Bungee Connect provides a completely integrated means of deploying apps to the live web. No FTP. No separation between your dev, staging, production and live environment. No local set-up on your machine. No bits to install anywhere. No web servers, no app servers, no stacks, nor libraries to install, patch or manage. No 'Yak shaving'. It's all taken care of for you. You develop your app through the browser, then deploy your app through the browser and map the app to your domain / URL (or embed the app in your site) - It's your app. Oh, and you get IE, Firefox and Safari cross-browser compat taken care of too - you build your app once and it just works in these three browsers. Sweet.
Bungee Connect includes a whole code share and team collaboration concept. You can keep your code proprietary, or you can share it with other Bungee Connect developers in your workgroup or with the wider Bungee Connect developer community. There's a lot more to this than I can cover here and I'll be writing a lot more on this soon, but I like how Mat Asay described the community aspect as a 'Sourceforge for the 21st Century'.
Bungee Connect allows developers to leverage the world of web APIs. We've been working with the API engineering and evangelist teams at Amazon, Ebay, Google, Microsoft Windows Live, PayPal, RealNetworks, Salesforce.com and Yahoo! to ensure Bungee Connect works sweetly with the multitude of their rich APIs (both WS* and RESTful). The aim is to ensure Bungee Connect can work with any web service that you choose and by working with these teams and their APIs in developing Bungee Connect, we've got a great test-bed to make sure we can achieve this goal.
Bungee Connect is No Fee for the developer to use in developing and testing Bungee-powered apps. You only pay once you've deployed your app commercially or unrestricted. We expect this to be US$1 per computer-network-interaction-hour, billed monthly. Again, more on this later.

And there's so much more. Tomorrow, anyone attending Web 2.0 Expo will be able to get hands on with Bungee Connect. We've got a booth with PCs (Windows, Macs and Linux) with the browser open (IE, Firefox and Safari) where you run through some tutorials and judge for yourself if you think we're all smoking crack (see pics below - no crack, just the booths). We'll also be updating the site with screencasts and plenty more details and Martin will be presenting and demo'ing with Brad on Wednesday morning. And by then I'm sure David might have something more to say too...

To underline a couple of points here: we're not live yet. We go into Beta in May and are looking for web developers who ideally already have experience in progamming against the APIs of the companies I mentioned earlier. So sign up if that sounds like you...

---

Update:

Dana Gardner has written up his thoughts on Bungee Connect.
Short but sweet mention on Mashable.com by Pete Cashmore.

Update 2 (4/18/07)

Richard MacManus blogged it over at Read/Write Web
Ryan Stewart blogged us too :-)

Scalability at Amazon (notes)

alexbarnett — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 13:17:00 GMT

Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon.com spoke at Supernova 2006 on the topic of Scalability at Amazon and the talk is available as a podcast at IT Conversations (thanks to James Governor for the link).

I made some notes as I listened this morning and thought I'd share:

A services business. Amazon.com is a platform. NBA.com is an application built on Amazon.com
If your online business is successful and you experience a 1000-fold increase in traffic you want your site to stay up! Building, operating and maintaining infrastructure that can be ‘always on’ and scale and is hard. Wouldn't it be nice to pay-as-you-go, rather than investing your capital up-front?
You need infrastructure that can incrementally scale. In 1995 Amazon.com had 1m books in its catalogue. That was the beginning. Now it has 35 different stores, not just books. Growing our business is not just a matter of buying bigger databases. Amazon has gone beyond that point.
Internally, Amazon is now a completely service oriented architecture (SOA).
A single Amazon.com page is made up of 100 to 150 individual web services.
What does 'scalability' actually mean? It means that if you add resources to the system the performance needs to increase proportional to the resources that you’ve added. Many of the academic algorithms don’t work like this. Many of the two-phase commit traditional transactional stuff doesn’t work like this. In general, the load on the network relevant to the application increases more than the magnitude of n. It doesn’t mean just handling more requests, it also means handling larger datasets. It needs to be able to add nodes to the system to achieve fault tolerance. It means that if you add bigger nodes you should be able to take advantage of more processing and more memory. It means that the more bigger nodes you add, the fewer people you require to actually maintain them and that as you add more nodes that system should not become more unstable. It means being more cost effective.
Target came to us and asked 'we really love what you've done with Amazon - can you do that for us?' Our interaction with Target made us realize we could become a platform rather than just a single application. Different sets of Amazon Enterprise web services: content generation and discoverability; identity; inventory management; fulfillment and customer service; order processing, payment and fraud protection. You can mix and mash these services.
Those services that are consumed by partners are guaranteed as 'always on'.
Cost effectiveness is scale.
Unexpected uses and applications built on top of our web services that we couldn't predict.
Our goal was expose all the atomic pieces that Amazon was really good at and to do that at scale and as web services.