A Conversation with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels

Werner Vogels is the chief technology officer at Amazon, where he has played a pivotal role in shaping the company's technology vision for over two decades. Before joining Amazon in 2004, Werner was a research scientist at Cornell University, where he focused on distributed systems and scalability. Cornell University, where he focused on distributed systems and scalability, both of which are concepts that would later influence 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 instrumental in guiding Amazon's transition from an online retailer to a global cloud infrastructure provider. He is one of the key architects behind Amazon's push into cloud computing, helping to define the new model for delivering infrastructure. He is known for his pragmatic customer focused approach to technology and for championing ideas such as you build it, you run it, APIs are forever, and more recently, frugal architecting, which emphasizes cost effective and sustainable software design. In this episode, Kevin Ball sits down with Werner for a wide ranging conversation. They discuss the early days of Amazon, the birth of AWS, the principles of the frugal architect, aligning cost to the business, engineering business collaboration, technical debt, and much more. Kevin Ball or Kate Ball is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He cofounded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI in action discussion group through Latent Space. Check out the show notes to follow Keball on Twitter or LinkedIn, or visit his website, keball.llc. Hello. K Ball here, and I have the absolute honor of getting to introduce today the chief technical officer of Amazon, Werner Vogels. Thank you, Kevin. Thanks for having me, and it's gonna be a fun day. I'm excited to get to talk to you. Now I like to start, especially with people who have done a lot of speaking and being introduced places. How do you introduce yourself? What do you highlight when you get to say, here, here's who I am? I've been doing this for twenty years, and I'm kinda tired now, but I have a lot of stories to tell. Yep. Now in general, there's always things in your past, and, I've been an academic, and I was in the army, and I worked in hospitals, and all these kind of stories don't really matter. I mean, the last twenty years of Amazon have really formed me, especially also because Amazon every year is a different year. And when I was 18 or something like that, he would have asked me if I would work for the same company for twenty years. I would have laughed at you. Yeah. But now, we are it's twenty years later, and I'm still here. Yep. So we wanted to talk today about cloud architecture. And this is …