Last year they hired Pat Helland from Microsoft, now Werner Vogels and Amazon have got a new team member and are clearly building a team of pretty bright people to work on the next step of distributed computing : dealing with SCALE. It is interesting to see that Geoff Arnold is now making the trip from Sun to Amazon to work with Werner and the team.

I think it is really cool when you can work on such large problems. Clearly there are only a few organisations that are facing these issues at the moment – Google and Amazon spring to mind – and I find it interesting that Geoff would move from Sun to Amazon. I think dealing with scale is going to become increasingly important for all businesses over time – and not just those web super giants that have to deal with it at the moment. It is going to require a total change in perspective to deal with it.

The other interesting thing is how scale – once you are faced with super massive scale – can become a friend rather than a foe. Its a bit like applying some kind of martial arts move (scale ju-jitsu?) to the massive problem and allowing its own inertia to let you handle things. At very large size I can see how applying some fundamentally different thought processes – ie looking biology and taking a probablistic rather than command and control approach – scale suddenly becomes alot less scary (although that is not to say it becomes easier!)

Interesting times – interesting problems!