Amazon and Scalability

22 Jul 2006

Amazon is all about scale. In recent presentations I have been demonstrating how Amazon Engineers are scalability experts who can take any concept idea and turn it into a service that can serve hundreds of customers and then grow it seamlessly to support hundreds of millions of customers. In the Amazon world there is no such thing as a limited beta; everything needs to be production quality when it launches and scale in every possible dimension. Incremental scalability is a key fundamental concept in all of our designs such that we can handle growth reliably and cost-effectively.

Caught this description of how Amazon approaches scalability in Werner Vogel‘s blog about Geoff Arnold joining the Amazon team.

The last point is important and something I’m trying to drive home at GenoLogics (a smallish 50 person start-up with plenty of growth oportunities and fun problems to solve). It’s an interesting nut for us to crack with product management having an overriding emphasis on being feature driven and those of us on the architecture team concerned with building infrastructure to enable efficiency, both in development time and physical resources.

We definitely don’t have the same enterprise requirements as an Amazon.com so incremental scalability hasn’t been and likely won’t be a top 3 concern, but it’s something not to be sacrificed because demand will *increase, standards *will emerge and larger customers *will *continue to come on board. There’s a certain expectation to meet without falling off the deep end of over-engineering.

Plus, it’s a fun to tackles these problems in a start-up environment where you’ve got the relative freedom to innovate and see immediate impact.

We’re hiring too (send your resumes to adam -AT- jordens -DOT- org).