It will probably be no surprise to learn that Amazon is one of the first big companies that utilized the internet and implemented microservices. Amazon, like many others, started out by being a big monolithic application. As it grew, additional programmers were hired and started working on the application. As you can imagine, over a hundred developers all working on the same code base will ultimately result in chaos and conflicts. This also happened in the years around 2000; so many modern tools (such as Git) were not nearly as advanced as they are today. Back then, Amazon began to break the big application up into more manageable and usable sub-units, called microservices.

Amazon is now deploying every 11.7 seconds (https://blog.newrelic.com/technology/data-culture-survey-results-faster-deployment/). Despite the challenge of having to enable hundreds of developers to work on the platform, Amazon also solved another problem: growth. Because amazon.com runs as a microservice application, it has no downtime. Amazon can take as many visitors as it gets because the system is managing itself.

By the way, Netflix, Uber, and many others are using Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon not only developed the concept and infrastructure for itself but is selling it to others who can use it for the same benefits.

Another noteworthy point is that Jeff Bezos has always advocated for small teams regardless of the size of the company. He claims that a team should not be larger than what two pizzas can feed (http://blog.idonethis.com/two-pizza-team/). As stated earlier, spreading the work out over to multiple people also applies to big corporations: keeping teams small increases efficiency.