Werner Vogels is the Chief Technology Officer at Amazon, where he has played a crucial role in shaping the company’s technology strategy for over two decades. Before joining Amazon in 2004, Werner was a research scientist at Cornell University, focusing on distributed systems and scalability, concepts that influenced the design of AWS. He holds a PhD in computer science and has authored numerous academic papers on the reliability and performance of large-scale systems.
As CTO, Werner has been key in guiding Amazon’s evolution from an online retailer to a global cloud infrastructure provider. He is one of the main architects of Amazon’s move into cloud computing, helping to establish the new model for delivering infrastructure. He is known for his pragmatic, customer-oriented approach to technology and for advocating ideas such as “you build it, you run it,” “APIs are forever,” and recently, Frugal Architecting, which emphasizes cost-effective and sustainable software design.
In this episode, Kevin Ball sits down with Werner for a comprehensive discussion. They explore the early days of Amazon, the inception of AWS, the principles of the Frugal Architect, aligning cost to the business, engineering-business collaboration, technical debt, and much more.
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