56:27A Conversation with Werner Vogels
From Y Combinator · Published Jul 22, 2019 · Watch on YouTube
TL;DR
Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, describes his journey from academia to Amazon, where he helped scale the company by inserting academic rigor into performance measurement, game days, and microservice decomposition.
Key insights
- Amazon in 2004 had no textbook for scaling; they were 5–10 years ahead organically, allowing duplication and technical debt if paid off, because moving fast and experimenting was more important than e
- Median latency (e.g., 12 seconds) is meaningless; 99th or 99.9th percentile latency is far more important for controlling customer experience.
- The first "game day" (simulating a data center loss) revealed that manual failovers and re-syncing data centers after recovery were huge unanticipated problems.
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