Werner Vogels is the chief technology officer at Amazon, where he has played a pivotal role in shaping the company's technology vision for over two decades.

Before joining Amazon in 2004, Werner was a research scientist at Cornell University, where he focused on distributed systems and scalability, both of which are concepts that would later influence the design of AWS.

He holds a PhD in computer science and has authored numerous academic papers on the reliability

and performance of large-scale systems. As CTO, Werner has been instrumental in guiding Amazon's

transition from an online retailer to a global cloud infrastructure provider.

He is one of the key architects behind Amazon's push into cloud computing, helping to define the new

model for delivering infrastructure. He is known for his pragmatic, customer-focused approach to

technology and for championing ideas such as, You it, you run it, APIs are forever,

and more recently, frugal architecting, which emphasizes cost-effective and sustainable software

design. In this episode, Kevin Ball sits down with Werner for a wide-ranging conversation.

They discuss the early days of Amazon, the birth of AWS, the principles

of the frugal architect, aligning costs to the business, engineering business collaboration,

technical debt, and much more. Kevin Ball, or K-Ball, is the vice president of engineering

at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders.

He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup,

and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through latent space.

Check out the show notes to follow KBall on Twitter or LinkedIn or visit his website, kball.

LLC.

Hello, KBall here, and I have the absolute honor of getting to introduce today, the chief technical officer of Amazon, Ferner Vogels. Thank you, Kevin. Thanks for having me, and it's

going to be a fun day. I'm excited to get to talk to you. Now, I like to start, especially with people

who have done a lot of speaking and being introduced places. How do you introduce yourself? What do you highlight when

you get to say, here, here's who I am? I've been doing this for 20 years and I'm kind of tired

...