Service-oriented architecture is the fundamental building abstraction for Amazon technologies.

Judge as of 2011. True: contemporaneous technical or official accounts (Amazon/AWS documentation, engineering talks or papers by Amazon leaders such as Werner Vogels, or reliable independent reporting) show that by 2011 Amazon's technology platform was built mainly from service-oriented architecture, with applications made up of independent services talking through interfaces, as its basic building approach. Mostly true: SOA was clearly Amazon's main architectural approach, with only minor exceptions or slightly different wording (e.g. 'services' or 'decentralized services architecture'). Mixed: SOA was used widely but sources show it shared that role with other basic approaches about equally. Mostly false: SOA was used only in parts of Amazon's technology, and the claim overstates a partial practice as the basic abstraction. False: evidence shows Amazon's technology in 2011 was not organized around SOA (e.g. it was mainly a monolithic architecture).

Set before the research began.

1. E1 The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology All Things Distributed (Werner Vogels' blog), reprinting Amazon.com's 2010 Shareholder Letter · 27 April 2011 Own record

   “Our technologies are almost exclusively implemented as services: bits of logic that encapsulate the data they operate on and provide hardened interfaces as the only way to access their functionality.”

2. E2 Amazon sheds light on Dynamo - ZDNET ZDNET · 3 October 2007

   “Amazon uses a highly decentralized, loosely coupled, service oriented architecture consisting of hundreds of services.”

3. E3 What Led Amazon to its Own Microservices Architecture The New Stack · 8 October 2015

   “The solution to the single-purpose function problem was the creation of a rule, to be adhered to by developers, that functions could only communicate with the rest of the world through their own web service APIs.”

4. E4 Amazon DynamoDB – a Fast and Scalable NoSQL Database Service Designed for Internet Scale Applications All Things Distributed (Werner Vogels' blog) · 18 January 2012 Own record

   “The Amazon.com ecommerce platform consists of hundreds of decoupled services developed and managed in a decentralized fashion.”

The 2010 Shareholder Letter, published in 2011, says Amazon's technologies are "almost exclusively implemented as services," each reachable only through hardened interfaces (E1). Independent reporting from 2007 describes Amazon as using a highly decentralized, loosely coupled service-oriented architecture made up of hundreds of services (E2). Later accounts agree: Vogels in early 2012 describes hundreds of decoupled services (E4), and an independent 2015 account describes the rule that functions talk to the rest of the system only through their own web service APIs (E3). Together these show that SOA was Amazon's basic building approach by 2011.