Comment by lugg
7 years ago
ala tell, don't ask.
https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TellDontAsk.html
I'd also like to point out that with all design decisions there are trade offs. Bezos made these trade offs specifically with Amazon's scale in mind and likely would not make the same trade offs with a team of 5 devs or even a team of a thousand devs that had good habbits around adhering to data boundries.
Clearly the dev culture at Amazon had a habbit of abusing those boundries or it wouldn't have gotten to the point where such a black and white mandate made a net positive change to the status quo.
> Bezos made these trade offs specifically with Amazon's scale
It's more nuanced for Amazon - they intentionally ignored language skills when looking to hire good developers (difficult in 90's Seattle), so the end result was a hodgepodge of services written in many different languages talking any number of protocols which including Service A directly accessing the database of Service M. This mandate was his answer to teams complaining about working with each other and the bullshit they had to go through when integrating features across service boundaries to get things done.