Skip to Content
Rewired, 2nd Edition
book

Rewired, 2nd Edition

by Eric Lamarre, Kate Smaje, Robert Levin, Alex Singla, Alexander Sukharevsky
April 2026
Intermediate
624 pages
12h 3m
English
Wiley
Content preview from Rewired, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 18Make your tech flexible and scalable—hello APIs!

Jeff Bezos at Amazon is famously known for a memo that changed Amazon and the world of software.1 In essence, the memo said:

  • All teams will expose their data and functionality through service interfaces (APIs) and teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
  • 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.
  • Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.

What Bezos was saying is that all software developed at Amazon had to be easy to connect to and disconnect from each other (often called decoupling). The application programming interface (API) was the capability to enable that. This was a radical notion back in 2002 because most systems and software were tightly integrated with each other, so any changes were complicated and time consuming.

The ability to decouple systems—literally being able to separate connections between one system and another—eliminates dependencies. Do it well, and you have the flexibility to securely make changes ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Rewired

Rewired

Eric Lamarre, Kate Smaje, Rodney Zemmel
Observability Engineering, 2nd Edition

Observability Engineering, 2nd Edition

Charity Majors, Liz Fong-Jones, George Miranda
Solutions Architect's Handbook - Third Edition

Solutions Architect's Handbook - Third Edition

Saurabh Shrivastava, Neelanjali Srivastav

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781394381906