ACM Queue Interview with Werner Vogels
An excellent interview with Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO. It’s very good to see someone doing things differently and so successfully, especially when it comes to structuring their business.
Of course there’s a lot of cheerleading in there, and I’m sure they suffer from a lot of organisational problems that he doesn’t talk about - but all that said, the way they have aligned their business architecture, personnel structure and technology architecture along with their strategy is a great example of proper strategic thinking.
His emphasis on testing being the really difficult thing also bears out my own experience with large distributed systems - just orchestrating a valid test can be a huge amount of work, and validating the test’s synthetic loads against real world load is a very skilled job. It’s worth putting the hours in here though.