lundi 26 janvier 2015

What service infrastructure or platform does Amazon use?


Where can I find resources, names of, or precise descriptions of the working technologies at the heart of Amazon's architecture?


Amazon's distributed service architecture is famous. To allow all the disparate components to work together though, it requires some common core infrastructure. I cannot find descriptions of exactly what this infrastructure is or how it works. I want to know so my company can implement relevant parts in our own increasingly complex computing environment.


There are two particular examples of the common platform-y parts referenced by Amazon's own leaders:




  • Service discovery and routing (i.e. the Single Unified Service-Access Mechanism)


    Werner Vogels stated in a 2006 interview published in ACMQueue:



    If you want to be able to aggregate services easily, if you want to insert advanced infrastructure techniques such as decentralized request routing or distributed request tracking, you need a single unified service-access mechanism



    So, what is this single unified service-access mechanism that Amazon uses? If the actual platform is not available outside of Amazon, are there other imitators or detailed explanations of its working principles and/or technical architecture?




  • Central monitoring system


    Both Steve Yegge's famous rant and a 2011 letter to Amazon shareholders, written by Jeff Bezos himself refer to the importance of monitoring. Bezos' letter calls out the "the monitoring system" as an example of shared "infrastructure tools", and I doubt the use of the definite article was a mistake. So what monitoring system does Amazon use? How does it work?







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