[amcvitty]

A big part of the difference has to be that if you have a small number of developers (esp. n=1) and you can deploy everything at once, then those layers just get in the way of fast change. It seems Amazon were optimising for the ability to distribute data because they had big volume, and hide its form so they could change it without having to change lots of applications.

Of course, there’s some cargo culting around services where people jump to that architecture before they need it, but for most apps YAGNI. it’s cool that their architecture was driven by clear needs “just in time” to allow them to continue to scale