Why Amazon Hired a Car Mechanic to Run Its Cloud Empire

It's kind of frustrating that otherwise interesting articles like this get buried under misleading titles like this, with a guy who some 30 years once worked on cars (high-end, cutting edge cars - not changing oil and brake pads on VW Jetta's) now working for a company that didn't even exist when he was a mechanic being described as 'Amazon hired car mechanic'. Michael Dell used to stock shelves in his youth, should newspapers run headlines like 'shelf stocker taking computer manufacturer private in 25B leveraged buyout'? Please.<p>&#60;/grump_mode&#62;

Every cruiser between Ketchikan and Bellingham has a copy of the Hamiltons' book on board: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Waggoner-Cruising-Guides-Secret-Coast/dp/0935727299" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Waggoner-Cruising-Guides-Secret-Coast/...</a><p>I didn't know he had a day job. A true renaissance man.<p>Edit: I don't want to geek out too much over his boat, but Nordhavns are awesome. Comfortable, tremendous amounts of internal space, long range, and designed for real cruising. Here's a magazine article on the Hamilton boat [pdf]. The photos of the engineering spaces will make you cry. <a href="http://www.mvdirona.com/TechnicalArticles/TheHamiltonNordhavn.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.mvdirona.com/TechnicalArticles/TheHamiltonNordhav...</a>

Car Mechanic? He was a Lead Architect for DB2, worked in various Lead/Architect roles on Microsoft SQL Server since SQL server 7.0, etc <a href="http://www.mvdirona.com/jrh/Work/default.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.mvdirona.com/jrh/Work/default.htm</a>

<i>"When Amazon’s EC2 and S3 web services arrived in 2006, they changed the computing business. Big server makers — most noticeably Sun Microsystems — had been tinkering with the idea of selling computer power in much the same way that utility companies sell power or water, but much to everyone’s surprise, Amazon — a seller of books and CDs — managed to produce a set of services that the market was willing to pay for."</i><p>This reminded me of the Jonathan Schwartz (Sun's CEO) blog mentioning "Chief Electricity Officers" - I tracked down this archived copy of the March 2006 post: <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20060720095546/http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan?entry=the_network_is_the_computer" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/20060720095546/http://blogs.sun.c...</a><p>Tracking those words a little further back, I found this 2004 snippet: <i>"Peter Gassner, Salesforce.com. Build or buy? No, subscribe. On-demand utility. Chief electricity officer was once a real position."</i> ( <a href="http://www.jaycross.com/wp/category/just-jay/page/130/" rel="nofollow">http://www.jaycross.com/wp/category/just-jay/page/130/</a> ), besides Nicholas Carr and others elaborations of similar vintage.<p>The ideas were definitely in the air, the problem was execution and delivery.

James is amazing at getting together people inside these big companies. His talk series at MSFT was legendary. His asking me to present at his talks when I was just a couple of years out of school opened the door for many good things for me at MSFT.

This link from the article on his analysis of preventing the Super Bowl power failure is pure gold:<p><a href="http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2013/02/04/ThePowerFailureSeenAroundTheWorld.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2013/02/04/ThePowerFailureS...</a>

nice read. It's also worth mentioning that James Hamilton's personal website [1] has been hosted by Godaddy ever since, including the domain's name servers.<p>[1] <a href="http://mvdirona.com" rel="nofollow">http://mvdirona.com</a>

Best hair ever<p><a href="http://mvdirona.com/jrh/work/JamesHamilton.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://mvdirona.com/jrh/work/JamesHamilton.jpg</a>

Because software people get's no respect