Dr. Werner Vogels is the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Amazon.com in Seattle, Washington. In charge of driving technology innovation within the company, Vogels has broad internal and external responsibilities. He is the only executive apart from Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos to speak publicly on behalf of Amazon.com. He joined Amazon in September 2004 as the Director of Systems Research. He was named Chief Technology Officer in January 2005 and Vice President, World-wide Architecture in March of that year.
Prior to joining Amazon.com, from 1994 until 2004, Dr. Vogels was a research scientist at the Computer Science Department of Cornell University. He mainly conducted research in scalable reliable enterprise systems. From 1999 through 2002 he also held a Vice President and Chief Technology position at Reliable Network Solutions, Inc. From 1991 through 1994 he was a senior researcher at INESC in Lisbon, Portugal. Vogels received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands with Prof. Henri Bal and Prof. Andy Tanenbaum as his advisors.[1] He is the author of many conference and journal articles, mainly on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing systems.
Vogels maintains a technology oriented weblog named “All Things Distributed” which he started in 2001 while he was still a scientist at Cornell. It was mainly used to discuss early results of his research. After he joined Amazon.com the nature of the weblog changed to more product oriented with some general technology and industry writings.
Vogels described the deep technical nature of Amazon's infrastructure work in a paper about Amazon's Dynamo, the storage engine for the Amazon Shopping Cart. He is in general regarded as one of the world's top experts on ultra-scalable systems and he uses his weblog to educate the community about issues such as eventual consistency.
During 2008 it became evident that Vogels was one of the architects behind Amazon’s approach to Cloud Computing, the Amazon Web Services (AWS). During that year Vogels was continuously on the road to promote Cloud Computing and AWS and its benefits to the industry. Information Week recognized Vogels for this educational and promotional role in Cloud Computing with the 2008 CIO/CTO of the Year award. In an accompanying interview with Vogels provides some details of the history of his work at Amazon.
Other awards include the 2009 Media Momentum Personality of the Year Award.[6] In 2010 readers of ReadWriteWeb voted on the "Cloud's Most Influential Executive" and selected Vogels with a double digit margin. Vogels is married to Annet Vogels, a former musician with the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra. They have two daughters, Laura Vogels and Kim Vogels, who both studied Drama and Theater Arts in London, UK and moved to New York City after completing their studies.
亚马逊CTO谈如何创新:一切围绕用户体验编辑本段回目录
亚马逊CTO Werner Vogel 4月18日上午消息,如何创新对中国互联网来说是一个难题,似乎总是被抄袭模仿的杂音围绕。不过创新在亚马逊CTO Werner Vogels看来很简单,不一定需要模式的颠覆或者是创造一个现在没有的东西,而是从用户体验角度去改善产品,就会意外收获创新。
说到创新这个词,很多人会联想到如何去创造一个现在没有的东西,而亚马逊对创新的理解是,如何能够把现有的东西做的更好。亚马逊最关注的三个方面是选品、低价以及便捷,他们通过技术以及小团队策略去迅速创新。
先说技术。“很多人以为亚马逊是一个零售商,其实亚马逊从一开始就是一个技术公司。”Werner Vogels说,“当初贝索斯在建立亚马逊时并不是要建一个书店,而是想要用互联网来实现一个其他的方式不能做到的东西。亚马逊成立17年大概花了几十亿美元在IT方面。”
相应的例子是:一般的实体书店可能有四万种不同的书,但是亚马逊的网站上有几百万上千万的书,这些都是通过互联网这种技术,去实现普通手段不能实现的东西。“所以亚马逊从一开始就定位是技术公司。”Werner Vogels说。
有了强大的技术背景后,亚马逊思考的,就是如何很快的去创新。为此亚马逊建立了很多的技术小团队,每个团队基本上都是8-10个人,这种团队的灵活性体现在,当有了新的想法马上就能够行动起来,而且沟通简单,不需要开很多会议才能把事情说清楚。
这些技术小团队围绕的是亚马逊提供的各种服务,比如购物、推荐系统、甚至评论服务。“亚马逊要成为世界上最以客户为中心的公司,我们很多的创新其实都是在为客户更好的体验去创新。”
另外还有一种创新方式,则来自于亚马逊扁平管理系统自下而上的创新。比如在亚马逊的运营中心,每个分拣、上货的工作人员,都可以通过其实际工作中的体会,去提出一些改进的要求。而这些会通过一些鼓励和荣誉来持续推进。 组织小团队进行创新的设计,实际上也是亚马逊的一种创新。Werner Vogels表示,曾经让他们觉得困难很大的时期是,整个技术团队的工程师70%时间是在存储这种基础设施方面,只有30%时间去创新,如何让大家能够动作更快的去创新?
于是亚马逊把工程师重新组织,成立了一些共同的团队将基础设施方面集中起来,服务于全公司,这样就释放了工程师很多额外的时间和精力,他们可以专注的去做一些创新,比如网上提供的服务、以及云计算等等,都是这样产生的。
那么亚马逊如何衡量创新的工作?Werner Vogels说完全体现在对用户体现做出的贡献,比如说用户是不是能够通过这项创新能够在亚马逊快速找到想要的东西。
Werner Vogels坦言,其实有些创新会和现有的业务矛盾。比如当初亚马逊开发第三方平台让其他商家入驻时,有些已有的供应商非常愤怒,他们认为亚马逊开发平台后,他们将面临着和更多人竞争。
“但是这项业务我们认为是对的,因为给我们的客户带来了更多的选品,提供了更好的体验。所以总是我们衡量创新只有一个标准,就是客户体验。”Werner Vogels说。(崔西)
Werner Vogels的访谈编辑本段回目录
Amazon AWS企业用户例子
NASDAQ开发了一套股票历史交易记录的查询工具。由于使用了
Amazon S3服务,整套系统非常简单。首先,NASDAQ每隔10分钟把所有股票的交易数据写到S3上的一个文件里。同时,NASDAQ开发了一个桌面客户端程序。这个程序定期从S3上的这个文件中下载股票数据,这样用户就可以在本机查询,比较股票交易记录了。所有的计算和数据展示都在用户PC上完成,不占用NASDAQ的资源。
Amazon AWS的未来和方向
Werner解释说,之所以会有Amazon AWS服务,是因为Amazon自己需要这样的服务。每当用户访问Amazon的一个页面式,Amazon在后台有200-300子系统在参与这个页面的生产。Amazon仔细地分析了研发工作量,发现研发人员有70%的时间是在处理IT系统的配置和调试。于是,Amazon决定将它的整个IT后台系统全部虚拟化,这也是
Amazon EC2的雏形。
对于为什么Amazon要自己开发AWS的所有软件的问题,Werner说对源代码的控制很重要,只有掌握了源代码才能保证AWS服务的性能,可靠性和费用。
对于IaaS和PaaS的关系
在技术上,Amazon内部强调技术的灵活使用,不局限于某种技术。
Werner说:“我们不规定工程师使用特定的技术,重要的是创造一个灵活的环境。” Werner又举了
Stax的例子。Stax是一套
J2EE的服务,用户可以借助Stax把现有的J2EE程序迁移到EC2上,而不用做任何修改。Stax不是由Amazon开发的,而是来自第三方。Werner认为正是云计算产业链的存在,Amazon AWS最终受益。而如果Amazon提高
AWS的门槛,只限定它自己的API,那就不会出现Stax这样的第三方服务,也就没有产业链了。
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Vogels