The Committee to Nuke Elysium

Back in 2001, when Amazon needed new ways of accommodating its ever-growing online operation, HP convinced Werner Vogels and crew to buy a mainframe-like system. But then Amazon decided that going forward was a better idea than going backward. After 12 months, the company ditched the hulking box and transformed its site – in Vogels words – “from a single app into a platform.”

This meant adopting a unified model for the literally hundreds of software tools that play into each page of Amazon.com. “We had all these shared pieces of software that needed to work together, and these became bottlenecks. Constructing one piece of shared software that needs to interact with all the others is just a nightmare,” Vogels explained. “So we developed a model where Amazon could be way more agile in terms of being able to build and try out new pieces of software without impacting everyone else.”