This mandate helped encourage a lot of Amazon’s thinking around AWS, externalized infrastructure, and business-to-business functionality. Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world.

All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols - doesn’t matter.ĥ. It doesn’t matter what technology they use. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.Ĥ. 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. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.ģ. All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.Ģ. For many reasons, it’s become somewhat legendary in the API/microservices space, as it formed the basis for much of the modern API design paradigm within the corporate view. The mandate in question was issued in 2002 to Amazon by founder Jeff Bezos. We’ll dive into each point’s specifics and look at how the mandate formed much of the modern thought around APIs and microservices.

This mandate would serve to form the backbone of Amazon in the modern web space, informing both the API development paradigm in the corporate mindset and a general improved approach to externalizing API functions.īelow, we’ll talk about the mandate and discuss why it has become so legendary in the API space. In 2002, according to tech legend, a mandate was issued by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

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