Marc Brooker

And so if you look at what we did with Aurora D-SQL, for example,

That was very much learning from that trend and taking a lead in that trend and saying, well, we're going to make S3, this block store that we built 20 years ago.

Sorry, object store that we built 20 years ago.

The

underlying durability layer of this new database.

But obviously it doesn't have the latency properties or the rich interface that an online database needs.

And so we're going to build an architecture on top of that that deals with all of these other things in a much better way, but doesn't have to worry about durability.

And, you know, so that was this perfect collision of a set of things I was hearing from customers and a set of things that were technical trends coming together and thinking, wow, we've got this opportunity to build something now that is going to be a market leading product that would be hard to imagine without either of those input signals.

I would say that the majority of engineers

my in practice knowledge about how to build distributed systems has come from being on call and analyzing and deeply understanding these postmortems and CREs.

One of the challenges of running a company like AWS and running large-scale systems is that folks come out of college with often great knowledge of computer science fundamentals, great programming skills, great mathematical skills.

All of that stuff is fantastic, but without the grounded knowledge of what it actually means to run and understand systems.

And on-call is one of the best ways to learn those things, best ways to see how do systems really run?

How do they really behave?

How do customers really use them?

What happens when customers use systems in unexpected ways?

How can we make systems more resilient to customers using them in different ways?

And I think that should be almost a goal of on-call, right?

If you have folks in your teams who are on-call and they're just closing the same ticket over and over and over, well, you know, that's where you need to just build some automation.

And again, building automation is easier than ever.