Amazon has been an amazing digital company in the last twenty years. I remember making my first order from them, unsure of whether the online bookstore would work better than browsing locally, or if I'd even get my books. I watched them transform into a great shipping company that could sell anything, to a digital reading company with the Kindle, and even an amazing cloud hosting provider with world class programming platforms. At each stage, Amazon has grown to become even more efficient and seductive, slowly gaining more of my business over the years.
Whether you like the business model and practices of Amazon or not, part of the reason Amazon has become a successful company is that they have an incredible software development process and great developers, both of which have produced a software stack that is very impressive. Apart from their web site, which is impressive, they host their Amazon Web Services, which is a dizzying array of services that can be purchased by anyone, at any time, and get some software up and running quickly. Even if you look at their free tier, it's very impressive in the number and type of services, including database access.
I ran across a piece on the 10 year anniversary of AWS that contains some software development lessons from Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon. It's a good list, and while some might not apply to your particular environment in the same way, it's a good list of principles to follow. Certainly planning to evolve and to handle failures is something that most of us need to consider. Including security from the ground up, however, is one thing that many of us know, but don't have good patterns, practices, or habits to follow. Even those companies that work in security conscious areas often leave security concerns until they are well into, or even finished, with their core software development.
The one area that I think is going to become more important for all of us in the future is understanding resource usage. Certainly we've needed to know some baselines and expected growth in the past to plan for upgrades and future needs. However, with the move to VMs and cloud services, how many of us really know what resource usage we would require for peak workloads and when. I suspect most people don't really know how to map their instance resource usage across different virtual systems, much less evaluate whether their system would be cost effective in a cloud scenario. A better understanding of what resources we really use is something that more and more organizations are going to expect from their technical professionals. I only hope we get some tools to help us here as this is a complex topic.
The move to cloud services is going to happen for many of us. We might not move all our data, or even much of it, but as we experiment with new platforms, as companies work to avoid capital expenditures, and as the platforms and services mature, more of us will end up with some cloud platform in a portion of our organization. During your journey, or even while you still work with on-premise systems, I'd keep the principles in Mr. Vogels' article in mind. They'll help you to build better software in the future.
