Took a little time off in the afternoon and attended Amazon Web Services AWS Cloud for the Federal Government event. Local. Right off the Metro. Free. What’s not to like? I wasn’t exactly the target audience, being a technologist and a long time AWS observer, but I enjoyed the presentations and learned a thing or two.
Werner Vogels is a long time hero of mine. Did a productive stint in academia and then moved to the world’s pre-eminent online retailer. And not just as some high ranking engineer but as a director and then quickly rose to CTO. I’m not sure if he gets his fingers dirty building systems anymore, but the successful direction and management he’s provided AWS is astounding.
His talk at the event was mostly summary and sales pitch for someone like me. I was hoping he’d get a little more into the roadmap for AWS, but he ran out of time. Still enjoyed his presentation. Reminded me yet again that elasticity and utility pricing in computation are two rreally powerful, reinforcing concepts.
The customer presentations and panel were also quite good, especially Tom Soderstrom, the CTO of NASA JPL, and Michael Wood, the Director of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, the guys that brought you Recovery.gov.
P.S. You gotta love an Internet CTO who was an early blogging adopter and who’s really into hip-hop.
P.P.S. Obtrivia, James Gosling (or one of his co-authors) has an L. L. Cool J quote in The News Book. One of the earliest computation/hip-hop mashups that I know of.