Welcoming Adrian Cockcroft to the AWS Team | Hacker News Reader

Welcoming Adrian Cockcroft to the AWS Team

allthingsdistributed.com

145 pointswerner16 comments

Nice addition to AWS team! Adrian was my boss at Netflix when Netflix started the transition to the cloud. Not only Adrian is a great smart guy but he had always been happy to share his knowledge. He was the best engineering manager I ever had in my career by a huge factor! Congrats Adrian!

AWESOME NEWS!!! Very fortunate to call Adrian a friend, truly an incredibly kind and generous human. He gave me a lot of really good advice when I was working at DigitalOcean, so I can only imagine how much of a benefit he will be to AWS. Awesome awesome awesome.

Anyone who did Solaris admin in the 90s and early 00s would know the name very well.

Interesting as of 2010 he had not even used Solaris for four years.

Good reading: http://perfcap.blogspot.com.au/2010/08/open-letter-to-my-sun...

Woah ! Big catch. He's obviously got some super dope scale experience from Netflix. Can only mean good things for AWS, considering MSFT is snatching some big cos as customers.

> He's obviously got some super dope scale experience from Netflix.

Actually, it's the other way around. He designed and built it, and Netflix learned scale experience from him.

Probably the most influential and successful IT manager in human history. (I worked in his group at Netflix.)

> Probably the most influential and successful IT manager in human history.

Wow. That's a big claim. I'd think that Fred Brooks (System 360) or Steve Jobs (the mac) might be in the running as well.

Urs?

I'd say Urs is on another level than all known eng manager to the public. He directed the evolution of Google's infrastructure, which pretty much is always at the forefront of modern large scale infrastructure.

I work at Google

Google is the leader in large scale infrastructure for a single (or small set) of customers (Google, Youtube etc). You could call this "private hyper-scale cloud". AWS is the leader in vending that infrastructure to the rest of the world (a.k.a. public cloud).

I would argue that over time the second market will be much larger and more important than what Google built internally.

Though, to be fair, Google is investing a lot in exposing some of its internal infrastructure as a public cloud. It's a relatively late comer to that game, but that game is also just getting started.

> a single (or small set) of customers (Google, Youtube etc)

Well, the applications inside Google are equally diverse compared to applications running on AWS, or at least on the same level. Google's infrastructure is used for an extremely wide range of use cases, from running a shell command remotely, to support planetary deployment of world's largest customer-facing applications.

It was not designed for simple or uniform use cases. Actually, it is impossible to design something that is simple and uniform, and at the same can support Google's growth on the way.

Your examples, Google (search), youtube, are actually examples that have extremely diverse requirements across their entirely tech stack. In fact, many of its requirements cannot be supported in any existing public Cloud providers.

Bill

> Wow. That's a big claim.

This is all so ridiculous. As if something like this can actually be measured and all of the "contestants" are even known.

Between his time at Sun and Netflix, Cockcroft has had massive influence on architectural development practices over the past decade and a half. I'd say that his influence is more on par with folks like Wirth, Hoare and the GOF. Not nearly as obvious as the guys and gals whose influence was reified in hardware products, but still huge.

Adrian is an amazing guy.

Truly knowledgeable. Humble. Technically deep. I've never worked FOR him but I've heard several times how good of a boss he is.

This is a great win for AWS.

Congratulations, Adrian!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com