News

Amazon Builders' Library Sheds Light on Internal AWS Development Practices

• By David Ramel
• 12/06/2019

Amazon Web Services has unveiled the Amazon Builders’ Library, a collection of articles and resources that explain the technical details about how the company builds and runs its business, specifically the software.

"We are often asked how we design, build, measure, run, and scale the hardware and software systems that underlie Amazon.com, AWS, and our other businesses," said evangelist Jeff Barr in a Dec. 5 blog post. "We are launching with a collection of detailed articles that will tell you exactly how we build and run our systems, each one written by the senior technical leaders who have deep expertise in that part of our business."

Organization of the library is divided into two main sections:

• Architecture – The design decisions that we make when designing a cloud service that help us to optimize for security, durability, high availability, and performance.
• Software Delivery & Operations – The process of releasing new software to the cloud and maintaining health & high availability thereafter.

Furthermore, the artcles are provided in three levels: 200 - High Level; 300 - Intermedite; and 400 - Deep Dive.

For example, a 200-level article in the Architecture section is titled "Timeouts, retries and backoff with jitter," while a 400-level article in the Software Delivery & Operations section is titled "Instrumenting distributed systems for operational visibility."

"The Builders’ Library articles are written by Amazon’s senior technical leaders and engineers, covering topics across architecture, software delivery, and operations," The company said in an announcement. "For example, readers can see how Amazon automates software delivery to achieve over 150 million deployments a year or how Amazon’s engineers implement principles such as shuffle sharding to build resilient systems that are highly available and fault tolerant."

Interested users can sign up to be notified when new articles are available.

AWS noted that the articles don't provide the "right way" to build software -- as no such ideal exists -- but instead can act as a description of the company's current best practices, which might not be a good fit for all organizations. "What works for Amazon may not be ideal for every company or situation," a FAQ says. "Even within Amazon, teams implement different optimal practices based on the situation, constraints, and the needs of their customers. Technology is constantly changing and what is a best practice today may not be the best practice tomorrow."