Step 2. Re-envision the world as products

In many organizations, systems that support the business are a large, complex, tangled messes of functionality that have developed organically over time. Once upon a time, Amazon was no different. The system that supported the Amazon.com business was a large, Java-based e-Commerce application.

In order to move to a product-model, where we could drive adoption and reuse of the functionality within Amazon.com for other purposes beyond retail, we first had to reimagine what those individual products would be. Examples include:

• Home Page

• Customer Account

• Search

• Shopping Cart

• Item Management

It's important to note that this is not the act of refactoring the architecture. Refactoring can't happen until we know what the components of that future architecture will ultimately be.

For the cloud platform that means moving away from a systems and technology focused alignment into collections of products, services and technologies that are grouped together into a product that aligns to our four-point definition highlighted previously. Examples of cloud products (which could include multiple AWS and non-AWS products and services) include:

• Digital Access Gateway

• Search

• Video Streaming

• Data Ingest & Conversion

• Database Migration

• Continuous Compliance