This is a brilliant post by an ex-Amazon current-Googler about the differences between the companies. It touches eloquently on the lessons learned from doing serious SOA at scale, based on Amazon’s experiences. There’s a sideline in corporate cultures too, with some terrifying stories about the culture at Amazon. He criticises Google for a lack of understanding of platforms and “universal services” and makes a strong case for them.
It also includes this gem, which made me smile:
I’ll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.All up, a very interesting read.