# Amazon's Distributed Computing Manifesto

DevFeed: [Amazon's Distributed Computing Manifesto](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/amazon-s-distributed-computing-manifesto-12528.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<http://brooker.co.za/blog/2022/11/22/manifesto.html>)

Author: Marc Brooker

Published: 2022-11-22T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Marc Brooker's Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/marc-brooker-s-blog.md>), [Marc Brooker's Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/marc-brooker-s-blog-2.md>)

Topics: [distributed-systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/distributed-systems.md>), [amazon](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/amazon.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/systems.md>), [Database](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/database.md>), [backends](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/backends.md>)

Tags: [amazon](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/amazon.md>), [architecture](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/architecture.md>), [architectures](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/architectures.md>), [database](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/database.md>), [scale](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/scale.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/systems.md>)

## AI overview

The article examines Amazon's 1998 distributed computing manifesto and its response to architectural growth challenges. It explains how direct application access to databases created tight coupling between applications, data models, storage, and business logic, and describes services and three-tier architecture as the proposed solution.

## Source excerpt

Amazon's Distributed Computing Manifesto Manifesto made manifest. In the Johannesburg of 1998, I was rocking a middle parting, my friend group was abuzz about the news that there was water (and therefore monsters) on Europa, and all the cool kids were getting satellite TV at home1. Over in Seattle, the folks at Amazon.com had started to notice that their architecture was in need of rethinking. $147 million in sales in 1997, and over $600 million in 1998, were proving to be challenging to deal with. In 1998, as Werner Vogels recently shared folks at Amazon wrote a distributed computing manifesto describing the problems they were seeing and the solutions they saw to those problems. The document itself, which you can (and should!) read in full over on Werner's blog is both something of a time capsule, and surprisingly relevant to many of the systems architecture debates going on today, and the challenges that nearly all growing architectures inevitably face. From the manifesto: The applications that run the business access the database directly and have knowledge of the data model embedded in them. This means that there is a very tight coupling between the applications and the data model, and data model changes have to be accompanied by application changes even if functionality remains the same. Despite being called a distributed computing manifesto, the Amazon of 1997 was already a distributed system by any reasonable measure. The problem was one of interfaces: the data store was serving as the interface between components and concerns, leading to tight coupling between storage and business logic. The architecture was difficult to scale, not in requests per second, but to adapt to new lines of business and the rate of overall change. This approach does not scale well and makes distributing and segregating processing based on where data is located difficult since the applications are sensitive to the interdependent relationships between data elements. The proposed solu