Software Engineering Daily A Conversation with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels
31 snips
Aug 28, 2025 Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer at Amazon, has been instrumental in shaping the company's tech vision for over 20 years. He shares fascinating insights into Amazon's transformation from an online bookstore to a cloud giant, discussing the birth of AWS and the principles of Frugal Architecting. The conversation highlights the critical alignment between engineering and business, the intricacies of managing technical debt, and how innovation in software architecture is essential for sustainability and growth.
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Why Amazon Started With Books
- Jeff Bezos picked books because the internet made a large catalog possible and nobody had documented e-commerce yet.
- Amazon engineers learned to invent solutions because they repeatedly faced novel problems without prior examples.
Pay-As-You-Go Changed Economics
- AWS changed the IT economic model by making customers pay only for what they used instead of large multi-year contracts.
- That shift gave engineers control over costs and altered vendor incentives fundamentally.
Make Cost A First-Class Requirement
- Include cost as an explicit non-functional requirement during architectural design along with security and compliance.
- Treat each architectural choice as having a dollar consequence and evaluate trade-offs early.
