I'm sure it would have been nice to have that tech in 94 and yet at the same time I get the feeling it had to play out the way it did for Amazon to succeed. Without the first part of the journey Amazon would not have gone on to build AWS.
The rest of us in 1994 were doing Sun RPC calls, while getting started with DCOM and CORBA, actually quite interesting Amazon's bet on distributed computing given the landscape back then.
So interestingly, they made that bet internally, standardised their own platform and then released some sort of abstracted on demand cloud compute services. However the tools they developed for themselves and the SOA style of development would have been valuable to others too. Google did the same. Netflix did the same. None of this stuff really emerged as a product. I'd argue it still hasn't. IF it had, maybe we'd be doing things a bit differently now. But then I guess proprietary RPC based architectures sort of failed along the way when we look at the list you mentioned.
CORBA was interesting, but the authorization side really strangled it. I worked with Tivoli back in the day, which was pretty much the largest production CORBA application in existence. CORBA allowed them to be super flexible when implementing methods, but the auth was brutal. In the end they had to cache all the auth information everywhere just to get decent performance out of it.
I've read the stories about what you guys built. It's pretty epic. And not like you were trying to do cool stuff, it was literally based on a need. That's what's amazing. Just manipulating software and infrastructure to do something it wasn't particularly made for just yet.
Sure, but plenty of us did, Nokia Networks infrastructure had plenty of CORBA for several years, and so did many CERN research projects processing HLT data.
