Communications of the ACM

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I M A G E B Y R A Y S O N H O @ O P E N G R I D S C H E D U L E R / G R I D E N G I N E / W I K I M E D I A . O R G ( C C 0 1 . 0 )

only meet those requirements if we revamped how the database was built.

It must have been exciting to have an
opportunity to rethink what a modern
database should look like.

Building upon a db-log-aware storage service was a shift in mind-set, but we knew we had the engineers and the knowledge. Old-style database transactions are quite expensive, easily triggering 10–15 storage operations, because they were developed with an attached disk in mind.

AWS reinvented how companies ac-
cess data storage and infrastruc-
ture—supported by a lot of education
on your part.

were developed in the 1990s, don’t offer a good base for that—nor, even, do open-source databases like Post-greSQL and MySQL. We realized that if we could just rip the whole architecture apart and redesign it in a reliable, high-scale, cloud-native manner, we would suddenly be able to build all the functionalities that we wanted our customers to have.

Such as?

Modern database users expect everything to be serverless and get seamless replication over at least three datacenters. They expect to be able to have instant backups and to be able to do instant schema changes without having to do complete table copies. We could

AMAZON VICE PRESIDENT and chief technology officer Werner Vogels has kept the company at the forefront of scalable systems since he joined in 2004. Vogels was one of the main driving forces behind the architecture of Amazon Web Services (AWS). His insistent reminders that “everything fails all the time” have been hugely influential to the developers of high-availability systems. Here, he talks about continuing to innovate in database technology— and keeping up with customer needs.

You have followed an unconventional professional path, working at the Netherlands Cancer Institute before returning to school for a Ph.D. in computer science. What drew you to scalable systems?

Originally, computer science just seemed like a good career. In that era —the mid-1980s—there were many areas that were completely undiscovered, and distributed systems was one of them. I liked research, and it turned out I had a gift for it.

Let’s talk about Amazon Aurora, which recently won the 2019 ACM SIGMOD Systems Award. When did you first realize the time had come to reconceptu-alize the stack?

Our biggest goal with Aurora was to make life easier for our customers, and to do that, the database required a lot of modern innovations.

Most database architectures, which [CONTINUED ON P. 95] Q&A

‘Everything Fails
All the Time’

Werner Vogels, an expert on ultra-scalable systems, talks about listening to customers, reconceptualizing the stack, and building a product-centered culture.