Nice addition to AWS team! Adrian was my boss at Netflix when Netflix started the transition to the cloud. Not only Adrian is a great smart guy but he had always been happy to share his knowledge. He was the best engineering manager I ever had in my career by a huge factor! Congrats Adrian!
AWESOME NEWS!!! Very fortunate to call Adrian a friend, truly an incredibly kind and generous human. He gave me a lot of really good advice when I was working at DigitalOcean, so I can only imagine how much of a benefit he will be to AWS. Awesome awesome awesome.
Woah ! Big catch. He's obviously got some super dope scale experience from Netflix. Can only mean good things for AWS, considering MSFT is snatching some big cos as customers.
Between his time at Sun and Netflix, Cockcroft has had massive influence on architectural development practices over the past decade and a half. I'd say that his influence is more on par with folks like Wirth, Hoare and the GOF. Not nearly as obvious as the guys and gals whose influence was reified in hardware products, but still huge.
I'd say Urs is on another level than all known eng manager to the public. He directed the evolution of Google's infrastructure, which pretty much is always at the forefront of modern large scale infrastructure.
Google is the leader in large scale infrastructure for a single (or small set) of customers (Google, Youtube etc). You could call this "private hyper-scale cloud". AWS is the leader in vending that infrastructure to the rest of the world (a.k.a. public cloud).
I would argue that over time the second market will be much larger and more important than what Google built internally.