Chief Of The Year: Amazon CTO Werner Vogels

SPREADING THE WORD
After spending half a day at Amazon's headquarters, I still had questions for Vogels, but, traveling somewhere in Europe, he had gone silent. Nevertheless, it's easy enough to follow Vogels. He's all over the Web--blogging, Twittering, and talking up cloud computing in interviews and on video.

With his Dutch accent, Vogels comes across as a bit of a Renaissance man--a music buff, photographer, and patron of the arts who speaks four languages and rides a motorcycle. His Twitter posts alternate between references to server optimization and network latency and an appreciation for "marvelous absurdistic physical theater."

I click on a video replay of Kara Swisher's on-stage chat with Vogels at LeWeb. Amazon's CTO tells the audience that the conversation with customers has shifted from cloud security to application deployment. Customers want to know how to move existing applications into the cloud, how much engineering work is involved, and how to exploit the functionality that Amazon makes available, he says.

Vogels, surprisingly, tells Swisher that security isn't the big issue it once was with customers, but he admits that AWS--which has experienced a number of hours-long service outages this year--has work to do in the area of reliability. "There's no excuse for any downtime or failure," he says. "One hundred percent availability is the only goal that you can have."

It's a reminder that, even though Amazon is four years into cloud computing, it's only recently begun addressing the stringent requirements of enterprise customers, and that work is unfinished. Amazon's flagship EC2 service, in beta testing for two years, became generally available just two months ago. Its SimpleDB relational database service is in beta testing. EC2 monitoring, management, load balancing, and autoscaling are still on the road map.

As my deadline approaches, Vogels resurfaces. I ask him about lingering concerns over data governance, security, and reliability in the cloud. He responds via e-mail that Amazon works with customers to address these concerns, but that "no customer has exactly the same needs as another."

In other words, with Bell driving AWS development and Selipsky managing front-line relationships, Vogels will need to keep racking up the frequent-flier miles. As Amazon reaches out to customers, his ability to articulate the benefits of cloud computing will have a lot do with whether they return the embrace. Years of engineering and cloud development are behind Amazon; the bigger job lies ahead.

Fine-Tuning

In a blog post, Vogels picked a favorite
album from his collection for each year
since he was born.

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Q&A: Amazon CTO Werner Vogels