I apologize up front if I completely misunderstand your intent. However ...
> Amazon (the product) really only has sellers, buyers, and products, with maybe a couple more behind the scene for logistics.
Is a comically bad hot take that is so entirely divorced from reality. A full decade ago the item catalog (eg ASINs or items to purchase) alone had closer to 1,000 different subsystems/components/RPCs etc for a single query. I think you'd have to go back to circa 2000 before it could be optimistically described as a couple of databases for the item catalog.
DylanDmitri sibling comment is a hell of a lot closer to the truth, and I'd hazard is still orders of magnitude underestimating what it takes to go from viewing an item detail page to completing checkout, let alone picking or delivery. Theres a reason the service map diagram, again circa 2010, was called "the deathstar."
> "FAANG is doing it so you should too" and "but what about when you have a billion users?" is poisoning the minds of people
This part I completely agree with. And many individual components in those giant systems are dead simple. I dare say the best ones are simplistic even.
Ex-Amazonian here, and while I agree with the facts you present, I do think the "tall" vs "wide" debate is being misapplied here.
Amazon is extremely and perversely obsessed with, and good at, building decoupled systems at scale, which in essence means lots and lots of individual separate "tall" systems, instead of monolithic "wide" systems.
So IMO, Amazon subscribes to a "forest-of-'tall'-services" philosophy. And even at that meta level, I would say the forests are better off when they grow taller, rather than wider.
> Amazon (the product) really only has sellers, buyers, and products, with maybe a couple more behind the scene for logistics.
Is a comically bad hot take that is so entirely divorced from reality. A full decade ago the item catalog (eg ASINs or items to purchase) alone had closer to 1,000 different subsystems/components/RPCs etc for a single query. I think you'd have to go back to circa 2000 before it could be optimistically described as a couple of databases for the item catalog.
DylanDmitri sibling comment is a hell of a lot closer to the truth, and I'd hazard is still orders of magnitude underestimating what it takes to go from viewing an item detail page to completing checkout, let alone picking or delivery. Theres a reason the service map diagram, again circa 2010, was called "the deathstar."
> "FAANG is doing it so you should too" and "but what about when you have a billion users?" is poisoning the minds of people
This part I completely agree with. And many individual components in those giant systems are dead simple. I dare say the best ones are simplistic even.