Stevey's Google Platforms Rant: Awesome Insight Into the Web Platform Wars

FASCINATING blog post from a Google engineer who used to work for Amazon.com. While the gist is a rant about Google+, the bits I dig are around Amazon’s transformation into a Service Oriented Architectural company (as well as hearing some insights about Amazon, a company I greatly admire).

Some insights about massive SOA:

• “every single one of your peer teams suddenly becomes a potential DOS attacker. “
• “if you have hundreds of services, and your code MUST communicate with other groups' code via these services, then you won't be able to find any of them without a service-discovery mechanism. And you can't have that without a service registration mechanism, which itself is another service. So Amazon has a universal service registry where you can find out reflectively (programmatically) about every service, what its APIs are, and also whether it is currently up, and where.”
• “monitoring and QA are the same thing.” … “In order to tell whether the service is actually responding, you have to make individual calls. The problem continues recursively until your monitoring is doing comprehensive semantics checking of your entire range of services and data, at which point it's indistinguishable from automated QA. “
• “Organizing into services taught teams not to trust each other in most of the same ways they're not supposed to trust external developers.”
• “ Bezos realized long before the vast majority of Amazonians that Amazon needs to be a platform.”
• “That one last thing that Google doesn't do well is Platforms. We don't understand platforms. We don't "get" platforms.“
• “The Golden Rule of Platforms, "Eat Your Own Dogfood", can be rephrased as "Start with a Platform, and Then Use it for Everything."  "”

My whole love affair with SharePoint revolves around it being a platform. You can read the whole post here: https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesvaVX 

Hopefully they don’t yank it down!