Chief of the Year: Amazon's Werner Vogels
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Jan. 9, 2009 Chief Of The Year: Amazon’s Werner Vogels Amazon’s CTO is the face of the new tech leader: a technologist who can articulate the business value of a technology like cloud computing to customers. This report examines how Vogels ended up in this role at the cutting edge of business technology leadership. IN THIS REPORT The New Face Of Tech Leadership . .2 Vogels On Architecture And His Role . .9 What We Can Learn From This Year’s Chief . .14 Copyright 2009 United Business Media LLC. Important Note: This PDF is provided solely as a reader service. It is not intended for reproduction or public distribution. For article reprints, e-prints and permissions please contact: PARS International Corp., 102 West 38th Street, Sixth Floor, New York, NY 10018 ; (212) 221-9595; www.magreprints.com/quickquote.asp Werner Vogels The New Face Of Tech Leadership FROM AN EIGHTH-FLOOR CONFERENCE ROOM at Amazon .com’s headquarters on Beacon Hill, with an expansive view of down- town Seattle to the north, Werner Vogels contemplates how large companies might use cloud computing. He points to system automa- tion and “autoscaling” beyond what IT departments have implement- ed internally. He envisions “partner clouds” of shared IT resources, Amazon’s data, and applications. He even suggests FedEx could one day run its customer-facing vital package-tracking application in the cloud. CTO and cloud evangelist is “For most of these things, redefining the role it’s really Day 1,” says of the business Amazon’s bearish CTO— technologist he’s 6 feet, 5 inches tall— dressed, as usual, in gray and black. By John Foley If we’re on the cusp of the computer industry’s next major architecture, the one beyond client- server, Vogels has played a key role in getting us to this point. A former re- searcher in Cornell Uni- versity’s computer sci- ence department, where he specialized in large- scale distributed systems, Vogels joined Amazon in 2004 to help the e-retailer design and scale its IT infrastructure to handle 2 Jan. 9, 2009 © 2009 InformationWeek, Reproduction Prohibited workloads many times Amazon’s own. engage CTOs, CIOs, and other professionals at “Amazon was reaching a point where customer companies in a discussion of how they needed to rethink how they that architecture could potentially change the were building their software—what way they approach IT. scale really meant, what reliability really meant,” he says. Amazon aspires to be “the earth’s most cus- tomer-centric company.” Vogels’ job des- The overhaul was required to support the cription as “an external-facing technologist” emerging Amazon Web Services business, isn’t just consistent with that mission state- which over the past four years has come to rep- ment, it’s cutting edge. Too many CIOs, CTOs, resent the state of the art in on-demand, pay- and IT organizations as a whole remain inter- as-you-go computing. With a user ID and a nally focused. They get treated like a cost cen- credit card, application developers and others ter because they are a cost center—they don’t can provision servers, storage, and other IT venture outside their organizations. Vogels, in infrastructure with unprece- contrast, is constantly on the dented ease. Vogels Vitae road talking with customers Joined Amazon as director of about what Amazon can do Vogels’ name and face are systems research in 2004; to address their computing promoted to CTO and VP the often associated with Ama- next year needs in its data centers, then zon’s cloud, but AWS isn’t a Computer science researcher reporting back to the rest of one-man show. Senior VP at Cornell University from 1994 to the AWS team with ideas on Andy Jassy conceived the bus- 2004, specializing in large-scale how to make that happen. If distributed systems iness model five years ago and you think Vogels’ situation is Research engineer with INESC, has had his hand at the wheel a computer science research different because he works for ever since. VP Charlie Bell is institute, from 1991 to 1994 a “vendor,” think again. CIOs the lead technical manager of Doctorate in computer science and CTOs in a variety of from Vrije University in Amsterdam AWS. VP Adam Selipsky is the industries must get better at Writes All Things Distributed liaison to the 440,000 develop- blog and uses Facebook, Friend- articulating the business value ers who have signed up so far. Feed, LinkedIn, and Twitter of their technology to cus- Vogels, Bell, and Selipsky re- tomers. Vogels even talks port to Jassy, and Amazon balked at our sugges- about Amazon building a “customer-oriented tion that one of them could be singled out. But architecture.” we did it anyway, selecting Vogels as Informa- tionWeek’s Chief of the Year, our highest editori- “Everybody has a lot of questions,” says Thors- al honor. Here’s why. ten von Eicken, CTO of RightScale, a startup with a management platform for AWS and Amazon’s 50-year-old CTO has emerged as the other cloud services, and a former colleague of right person at the right time and place to Vogels at Cornell.Vogels, he says, can both “ex- guide cloud computing—until now, an emerg- plain the vision” of cloud computing and dive ing technology for early adopters—into the into the technical minutia. mainstream. He not only understands how to architect a global computing cloud consisting If all goes as planned, Amazon’s cloud will of tens of thousands of servers, but also how to serve as an extension of corporate data centers 3 Jan. 9, 2009 © 2009 InformationWeek, Reproduction Prohibited for new applications and overflow hosted queue for buffering messages between capacity, so-called cloud bursting. distributed applications, into beta testing. Over time, Amazon will then take on more and more of the IT workload It was the first of many Amazon infrastructure from businesses that see value in the components to be offered as services. In 2006, model. Customer-centric? What Amazon’s do- ing goes beyond that. Amazon’s cloud becomes their cloud; its CTO, their CTO. Fine-Tuning In a blog post, Vogels picked a favorite album from EVOLUTION OF AWS his collection for each year since he was born. Standing in the lobby of Ama- 1958 Jerry Lee Lewis, Great Balls Of Fire 1959 Ray Charles, What I’d Say zon’s headquarters, a 1930s Art 1960 Miles Davis, Sketches Of Spain Deco building that the $14.8 bil- 1961 Robert Johnson, King Of The Delta Blues Singers 1962 Booker T & the MG’s, Green Onions lion-a-year company has out- 1963 James Brown, Live At The Apollo grown, I see Amazon’s customer 1964 John Coltrane, Love Supreme 1965 Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited focus in action. The receptionist, a burly guy 1966 Cream, Fresh Cream with tattooed arms, is on the phone for five 1967 The Doors, The Doors 1968 Johnny Cash, At Folsom Prison minutes, patiently helping an author who 1969 Rolling Stones, Let It Bleed called fretting over inaccuracies in the des- 1970 The Who, Live At Leeds 1971 Marvin Gaye, What’s Going On cription of his book on Amazon’s site. Problem 1972 Deep Purple, Made In Japan 1973 Pink Floyd, Dark Side Of The Moon solved. 1974 Genesis, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway 1975 Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti 1976 Eagles, Hotel California My first meeting was with Jassy, a soft-spoken 1977 The Stranglers, Rattus Norvegicus New York transplant and sports nut with seven 1978 Herman Brood & His Wild Romance, Shpritsz 1979 The Clash, London Calling TVs in his basement, who served as technical 1980 AC/DC, Black In Black assistant to CEO Jeff Bezos in 2002 and 2003 1981 The Police, Ghost In The Machine 1982 Steel Pulse, True Democracy before launching Amazon’s Web services busi- 1983 U2, Under A Blood Red Sky ness. As Jassy explains it, the seed for AWS was 1984 Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense 1985 John Cougar Mellencamp, Scarecrow planted in 1999 when the company decided to 1986 Run DMC, Raising Hell “decouple” system components to support its 1987 Guns N’ Roses, Appetite For Destruction 1988 Public Enemy, It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back strategy of letting other e-commerce compa- 1989 Eric Clapton, Journeyman 1990 Angelo Badalamenti, Twin Peaks Soundtrack nies integrate the features of Amazon with 1991 Nirvana, Nervermind their own sites. “We found religion around SOA, 1992 Rage Against the Machine, Rage Against The Machine 1993 Live, Throwing Copper and it changed our thinking about systems and 1994 Neil Young, Sleeps With Angels components,” he says. 1995 Garbage, Garbage 1996 James Cotton, Deep In The Blues 1997 Erykah Badu, Baduizm As the number of third-party Web sites tapping 1998 DMX, Flesh Of My Flesh, Blood Of My Blood 1999 Red Hot Chili Peppers, Californication into Amazon’s functionality to sell products 2000 Eminem, The Marshall Mathers LP approached a million, the APIs through which it 2001 The Strokes, Is This It 2002 Richard Locker, Jewish Cello Masterpieces exposed its underlying technology as services 2003 Linkin Park, Meteora 2004 Green Day, American Idiot grew ever more important. In 2003, Bezos asked 2005 Fiona Apple, Extraordinary Machine Jassy to develop a business plan. The next year, 2006 Matisyahu, Youth 2007 Foo Fighters, Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace Amazon introduced its Simple Queue Service, a 4 Jan. 9, 2009 © 2009 InformationWeek, Reproduction Prohibited Amazon introduced Simple Storage sumed by AWS surpassed that required for Am- Service (S3) and Elastic Compute azon’s retail site.