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What happens when someone ignores a phone call from Amazon because, hey, they thought it was just an online bookstore, only to end up helping shape the future of cloud computing for the next two decades? This one is one of those incredible origin stories I'm always excited to share on here because I'm going to be joined by one of the most influential minds in modern technology. His name is Werner Vogels. He's the chief technology officer at Amazon and one of the driving forces behind the rise of Amazon Web Services. And the reason we're excited to get him on today is AWS is marking its 20th anniversary. And Werner brings a rare perspective that stretches right back from the earliest days of Amazon's internal engineering challenges to the creation of services like S3, EC2, Dynamo, and the pay-as-you-go cloud model that changed the economics of IT forever. And here's someone that has seen firsthand exactly how Amazon moved from solving its own impossible scale problems to building an infrastructure that now powers businesses all around the world. In this conversation today, we're going to talk about that near-missed opportunity when he almost didn't take Amazon's call. But we'll also talk about what he saw inside Amazon's technology kitchen and why commercial software simply just couldn't keep up with the company's scale, and learn more about how customer obsession shaped AWS and why pay-as-you-go changed everything, and how AI is creating what Werner describes as a new developer renaissance.
And at a time where so much of the AI conversation is dominated by fear and replacement, my guest will offer something far more practical and optimistic: a vision where AI becomes a better tool for builders rather than a replacement for them. And he'll also share why curiosity, communication, and human collaboration may matter even more in the next generation of software development. I want to give a quick thank you that partners like NordLayer make it possible for me to attend events, speak with industry leaders, and bring those insights right back to you here on every podcast, every episode on the Tech Talks Network. And I was recently at a tech conference where Mark Templeton said that the browser is now the computer. It was a modern take on the old idea from Sun Microsystems where they said many years ago that the network is the computer. And I think this perfectly captures where we are today. The browser is now the computer, and work has shifted into the browser, which means security has to follow. And this is exactly what NordLayer is doing with its new business browser. Instead of protecting the edges and hoping for the best, it secures the place where people actually do most of their work. And it also gives their company better visibility, stronger control, and a more practical way to manage risk. It's one of those ideas that feels so obvious once you hear it. But if you want to know exactly what that shift looks like in practice, please pop over to nordlayer.com/browser to find all the information you need. And please come back to me, let me know your thoughts on it. So, with AWS celebrating 20 years and the next era of builders already taking shape, what does the future really look like for developers, businesses, and the people creating what comes next? Well, let's find out as I introduce you to my guest now.
So, thank you for joining me on the podcast today. For people just hearing about you for the first time, you are a man that needs no introduction, but just tell everyone listening who you are and what you do.
I'm Werner Vogels. I'm the chief technology officer of Amazon.com. And the role of a chief technology officer can have different ways. You can look at that in different ways. You know, some CTOs are just a data center manager. When I joined Amazon, I came out of academia when the role of CTO was really as sort of the big thinker. Until 2004 more or less, when I joined Amazon, engineers were really good at scaling, but from a practical point of view, they'd gotten their hands dirty. And by getting an academic on board, they hoped to sort of more structure the way that we were building our systems because we were building systems at a scale that nobody else had done before, and absolutely not, and you know, no commercial software operated at the scale of Amazon. And so, but when we started AWS, the role as a CTO changes. It changes much more as what I think Scott called it an external-facing technologist: someone that talks to your customers, understands your customers, and takes that information back and what's the next set of tools that we need to build. What are the kind of things are we doing well or not? Like in my last keynote at re:Invent, I didn't talk about tools at all, but how do we change as developers? And so the chief technology officer is not only the one that actually runs technology. There's a lot of other parts to that that are, in my view, really fun.
And I'd love to take you right back to the beginning of that journey because before you joined me on the podcast today, I was reading that you said you almost didn't take the call from Amazon because, hey, it was just an online bookstore. So take me back to that moment and what changed your mind when you finally looked under the hood, because it feels like almost a crossroads moment then.
It is because it's really true. I almost didn't take that call. So in the US, it's pretty normal for academics to actually do some consulting for companies and give them advice and things like that. And I've done things for Sun Microsystems and Microsoft and DEC and others. And when Amazon called to actually say like, hey, can you come and give a talk about your work? And I go like, really? Amazon? It's a bookshop, a web server, and a database. How hard can it be? But I was curious, so I did go. And one glimpse in their technology kitchen, and I was completely blown away. Commercial software doesn't work at all. And so they had to build everything themselves. That's an opportunity you couldn't let go.
