Werner, today, we are exploring the concept of how complexity grows from simple origins. Can you tell us more about it? Many of our original services have the moniker 'simple,' like S3, the Simple Storage Service. Simple, maybe in the name, but the reality is, by making things simple, it can be terribly complicated. In this episode of Simplexity, we tell the story of one of the world's largest storage systems and the team of innovators working to keep it simple.
You know, it was back in the early 2000s. There were, I think four, maybe five of us: me, Werner, Al, a few others that are just not here anymore. It was a REST API and a handful of features. So, Alex inspired lots of the simplicity behind S3, right?
I think he really appreciates my approach. I'm all about keeping it simple. Just, you know? This one night, we'd ordered some pizzas, and… He comes in. He's holding this stack of pizza boxes, you know, like 20 feet high. Oh, God! I think I know what this is. Something different. What is this? He trips onto the ground, drops most of the pizzas. Oh, oh, and utters the words, two pizzas per team, I guess. Managed to save two pizzas. Good on him. And we developed two pizzas per team.
The two-pizza team, yes. We broke down our functional hierarchies and restructured our organization into small, autonomous teams, small enough that we could feed each team with only two pizzas.
Together, we make one pizza. Oh, plus Jeff and Kevin. Two pizzas per team. Back when we were looking at ways to reduce storage costs… I devised this very simple plan. And Alex just shows up with a pizza cutter, and he starts sharding the slices. Right now, I'm working on the Franken Pizza. It's a Frizza. Boom. Welcome, erasure coding. We had to rewrite our entire storage engine. Well, he had to. Yeah. Did you hear of the glacier incident?
Alex kept making people put half of their pizzas straight into the freezer, and there were so many leftovers, so many leftovers. Can you tell us about the Glacier Incident?
Glacier storage classes, you mean? Different cost tiers for different access patterns. We're always looking to keep things simple for our customers, no matter the complexity it adds for us. This is just something we have learned to live with, embrace, cherish, even. Who really knows if Alex sparked all of these innovations? He became part of the furniture. Ooh, that's pungent. That's 2016. Here he is. This is the guy. -This guy loves you. -What, I… what? What's up, Alex? So, all this success was fueled by the humble pizza.
Vogels, W. (2024, December 5). AWS re:Invent 2024 - Dr. Werner Vogels Keynote [Interview transcript]. AWS Events. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/373282/
MLA
Werner Vogels. "AWS re:Invent 2024 - Dr. Werner Vogels Keynote." AWS Events, 5 Dec. 2024. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/373282/.
BibTeX
@misc{vogels2024_373282,
author = {Werner Vogels},
title = {AWS re:Invent 2024 - Dr. Werner Vogels Keynote},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, AWS Events. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2024},
month = {dec},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/373282/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
