‘Invention Is in Our DNA and Technology Is the Fundamental Tool We Wield to Evolve and Improve Every Aspect of the Experience We Provide Our Customers.’

Jeff Bezos, in his annual letter to Amazon shareholders:

State management is the heart of any system that needs to grow to very large size. Many years ago, Amazon’s requirements reached a point where many of our systems could no longer be served by any commercial solution: our key data services store many petabytes of data and handle millions of requests per second. To meet these demanding and unusual requirements, we’ve developed several alternative, purpose-built persistence solutions, including our own key-value store and single table store.

I.e., if Amazon weren’t a serious technology company capable of inventing what it needed, if Amazon were “just a store”, its growth would have been limited by technology.

★ Wednesday, 27 April 2011