excerpt from texts I sent to Vic
A word on self service infrastructure within big tech companies:
dude, I think a big part of Spotify’s success & continued growth is their strong engineering culture. been reading their material for the last half year or so, and one thing they promote as a first class citizen is autonomy of their teams. they have up to 2k engineers now (up from 300 in 2013), & to quote their engineering blog
To enable all squads to make progress even though they have dependencies on another squad we have a few strategic ideas that we try to apply everywhere: our transparent code model and our self service infrastructure.
self service infrastructure is a huge money making machine in tech, that’s basically amazon’s whole thing with AWS, giving you all the tools they use internally to get their own shit done.
it’s interesting to see the benefits self service infrastructure is giving to different companies. I read an article on this by a senior engineer who’s worked at Google & amazon, and talks about it, I’ll look for it for you. really interesting read
Jeff Bezos says:
“All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.”
it’s a must read.