In 2011, during the Google Plus roll out, Googler Steve Yegge criticizes the company’s struggle to build platforms. In that post, he makes a contrast with Amazon. He describes Jeff Bezos’ Big Mandate from ~2002. The key points of the mandate:
1. All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
2. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
3. 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. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
The post went superviral. It helped kick the SOA revolution into high-gear. HTTP interfaces were stood up everywhere.
I was on a team that got swept up in the ecstasy. I guess a lot of us forgot that the architectures being described were for the two biggest internet companies on the planet.
Zooming out, there are two reasons one might justify an HTTP interface in front of their database…
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