Amazon Builders’ Library – A collection of articles and resources about internal AWS development practices. Amazon Web Services has launched the Amazon Builders’ Library. This library explains the technical details of how the company builds and manages its business, particularly the software. In a blog post on December 5, Jeff Barr, an evangelist, stated that many people ask how they design, build, measure and run the hardware and software systems that underpin Amazon.com, AWS and other businesses. We are launching a collection of detailed articles that will show you how we build and manage our systems. Each article is written by senior technical leaders with deep expertise in the area. The library’s organization is broken down into two main sections.

• Architecture – Design decisions made when designing cloud services that optimize security, durability, and performance.
• Software Delivery and Operations – This is the process of releasing new software into the cloud and maintaining high availability.

The artcles can be found at three levels: 200 – High Level, 300 – Intermedite, and 400 – Deep Dive. A 200-level article on Architecture is titled “Timeouts and retries with jitter” while a 400-level article on Software Delivery & Operations is titled, “Instrumenting distributed system for operational visibility.” In an announcement, Amazon stated that the Builders’ Library articles were written by senior technical leaders and engineers. They cover topics such as architecture, software delivery, operations, and more. “Readers can see how Amazon automates its software delivery to achieve more than 150 million deployments per year, or how Amazon engineers use principles such as shuffle-sharding to create resilient systems that are highly reliable and fault-tolerant. To be notified of new articles, interested users can sign up. AWS pointed out that the articles do not provide the “right” way to build software. There is no such thing. Instead, they can be used as a description for the company’s best practices, which may not be suitable for all organizations. A FAQ states that “What works for Amazon may be different for every company or situation.” “Even within Amazon, different teams use optimal practices depending on the circumstances, constraints, and needs of their customers. Technology is constantly evolving and the best practice may not be the best tomorrow.