A Conversation with Werner Vogels

This is a real privilege for me. We are here today with Dr. Verner Bogles. He is the CTO of Amazon and, of course, has a lot of really exciting experience with that. So, we're gonna be talking to him today about his experience with Amazon, about his experience with startups, and about lots of technical topics as well that will be relevant to many of us. So, thank you all, and let's give it up for Dr. Boles. Thank you.

Okay, so we're gonna be talking, of course, about Amazon today and about your role there, but I'd like to start with a little bit of background. Would you mind telling us about your career before you started at Amazon and sort of what brought you to that point?

"How much time do we have?"

So, I'm sorry. I was an academic before I joined Amazon. I had been a research scientist at Cornell for 10 years, building very large-scale distributed systems. As is common in American academia, you tend to be motivated to do startups on the side. So, we did two startups on the side; one of them already existed when I joined them and they got sold off and were successful to a company called Stratos. I don't know if anybody remembers that; this was before your time.

Yeah, and another company that actually failed. So, we had both experiences; that was great, kind of. So before that, I'm not the typical sort of computer scientist. There wasn't until '28 when I decided to actually go back to school. I worked in hospitals before that, doing radiotherapy in the Dutch Cancer Research Institute, working with cancer patients. I don't know what I realized—I really hated all these people dying around me. So, I decided to go do something that had no humans involved whatsoever.

Computer science seemed like a really good thing to go into, and this was me in the mid '80s. So, you know, the computer scientists know where it is now, but it turned out I had a gift for it, and I didn't know that up front. From there, I wanted to research because I worked as for the kind of things that I really was interested in, so I pitched to work for a number of years in a research institute and then was invited to come to Cornell.

At one moment, so what I did do around that time, also when I was still at Cornell, was actually either consult for large companies like Nike, HP, and the suns and whatever of this world, and also often give talks. At one moment, Amazon invited me to come give a talk about some of the material I was working on, and I think, like, really, really have to go? What is this? This is a bookshop, you know? It's a web server and a database; how hard can it be?

One glimpse in that kitchen, however, and I realized this is a massive technology operation. It’s not a retailer; it's a technology company. Operating at the scale that I'd never seen before, definitely not at all the companies that I had consulted for. The challenges that they were faced with, from a distributed systems researcher perspective, were amazing. So, I didn't need to think very hard when they offered me the new job.

"Well, that's incredible."

So, that's interesting. Do you feel like that was a change, like today, sort of like the interesting distributed systems problems are kind of like huge companies? Or maybe before with academia, or was that just the way?

"Yeah, I'm gonna go."

I think that still is the case. I think most distribution researchers have become more aware of the kind of scale that these very large companies need to operate. Or, not even these very large companies; I think if you think about any successful internet company or digital-only company, it needs to operate at a scale that is unparalleled.

When I joined Amazon in 2004, many of you, if you're gonna be successful, will be easily operating at that particular scale that Amazon was at in 2004. However, there was no body of work that you could really be relying on. The chatty with a lot of effort went into basically keeping the lights on. Long things that iCloud...