Werner Vogels

So everything that the Amazon engineers had to do to build Amazon was to invent everything themselves.

Because the kind of technology that they could buy couldn't operate at their scale.

We've had a number of bloody noses because of that.

So when I joined Amazon, engineers at Amazon were brilliant at scaling.

But from a, let's say, practical, lots of scars kind of approach.

And Jeff hoped that by bringing a former academic in, you get some more robustness.

You know, you get some more...

better fundamental approach to scale and reliability and things like that.

And we did lots of large projects around removing all single points of failures or how to best measure, how do you measure?

What does it mean to measure?

If 50% latency on your webpage,

means nothing.

Yeah, well, it means that 50% of your customers are getting a worse experience.

You need to know how much worse.

Now, if I think about CTOs, there's sort of four or five different types, and there's no real well-described one.

I think, first of all, there's the data center manager.

He reports up to the CIO.

Then you have the CTO that is the second person in the startup, often the co-founder, the first coder.

And then you have the big thinker, sort of the role that I got when I came into Amazon, sort of like look at the whole picture, what are the kind of things we need to do.

But then when we started doing AWS, your world changes, right?