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Geoff Arnold goes to Amazon

July 12th, 2006

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!

Technorati Tags: Pat Helland, Werner Vogels, Amazon, distributed computing, SCALE, Geoff Arnold

Entry Filed under: Distributed Computing, Jini