Werner Hans Peter Vogels (born 3 October 1958) is the chief technology officer and

vice president A vice president or vice-president, also director in British English, is an officer in government or business who is below the president (chief executive officer) in rank. It can also refer to executive vice presidents, signifying that the vi ...

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...

in charge of driving technology innovation within the company. Vogels has broad internal and external responsibilities.

Early life and education

Vogels studied

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

at The Hague University of Applied Sciences finishing in June 1989. Vogels received a Ph.D. in computer science from the

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam The (abbreviated as ''VU Amsterdam'' or simply ''VU'' when in context) is a public university, public research university in Amsterdam, Netherlands, founded in 1880. The VU Amsterdam is one of two large, publicly funded research universities in ...

Netherlands , Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...

, supervised by Henri Bal and Andy Tanenbaum.

Career

After his mandatory military service at the

Royal Netherlands Navy The Royal Netherlands Navy (, ) is the Navy, maritime service branch of the Netherlands Armed Forces. It traces its history to 8 January 1488, making it the List of navies, third-oldest navy in the world. During the 17th and early 18th centurie ...

, Vogels studied

radiology Radiology ( ) is the medical specialty that uses medical imaging to diagnose diseases and guide treatment within the bodies of humans and other animals. It began with radiography (which is why its name has a root referring to radiation), but tod ...

, both diagnostics and

therapy A therapy or medical treatment is the attempted remediation of a health problem, usually following a medical diagnosis. Both words, ''treatment'' and ''therapy'', are often abbreviated tx, Tx, or Tx. As a rule, each therapy has indications a ...

. He worked at the Antoni van Leeuwenhoekziekenhuis, part of the

Netherlands Cancer Institute The Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI) in Amsterdam was founded in 1913 by, among others, the surgeon Jacob Rotgans. The NKI, together with the Antoni van Leeuwenhoekziekenhuis, is formed into the NKI-AVL, which combines a scientific research inst ...

, from 1979 through 1985. In 1985 he returned to university to study computer science. After completing his studies, he pursued a career in computer science research. From 1991 through 1994, Vogels was a senior researcher at INESC in

Lisboa Lisbon ( ; ) is the capital and largest city of Portugal, with an estimated population of 567,131, as of 2023, within its administrative limits and 3,028,000 within the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, metropolis, as of 2025. Lisbon is mainlan ...

, Portugal. He worked with Paulo Verissimo and Luis Rodrigues on fault-tolerant

distributed systems Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different computer network, networked computers. The components of a distribu ...

, evolving the reliable group communication system that was developed in the context of the Delta-4 project. In 1994 he was invited to join the computer science department of

Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

as a visiting scientist. From 1994 until 2004, Vogels was a research scientist at the Computer Science Department of Cornell University. He mainly conducted research in scalable reliable enterprise systems. He is the author of many conference and journal articles, mainly on

technologies for enterprise computing systems. He co-founded a company with Kenneth Birman and Robbert van Renesse in 1997 called Reliable Network Solutions, Inc. The company possessed U.S. patents on computer network resource monitoring and

multicast In computer networking, multicast is a type of group communication where data transmission is addressed to a group of destination computers simultaneously. Multicast can be one-to-many or many-to-many distribution. Multicast differs from ph ...

protocols. From 1999 through 2002, he held vice president and chief technology officer positions with the company. He joined Amazon in September 2004 as the director of systems research. He was named chief technology officer in January 2005 and

in March of that year. Vogels described the deep technical nature of Amazon's infrastructure work in a paper about Amazon's

Dynamo "Dynamo Electric Machine" (end view, partly section, ) A dynamo is an electrical generator that creates direct current using a commutator. Dynamos employed electromagnets for self-starting by using residual magnetic field left in the iron cores ...

, the storage engine for Amazon's

shopping cart A shopping cart (American English), trolley (British English, Australian English), or buggy (Southern American English, Appalachian English), also known by a variety of #Name, other names, is a wheeled cart supplied by a Retail#Types of ret ...

. In 2023 Werner Vogels introduced "The Frugal Architect" which outlines seven laws to make

software architecture Software architecture is the set of structures needed to reason about a software system and the discipline of creating such structures and systems. Each structure comprises software elements, relations among them, and properties of both elements a ...

s more cost efficient.

Awards

* 2008: ''

Information Week ''InformationWeek'' is a digital magazine which conducts corresponding face-to-face events, virtual events, and research. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United State ...

'' recognized Vogels for educational and promotional role in cloud computing with the 2008 CIO/CTO of the Year award. * 2009: Media Momentum Personality of the Year Award. * 2010: ** ReadWriteWeb voted on the "Cloud's Most Influential Executive" and selected Vogels with a double-digit margin. ** Vogels was named a

TechTarget TechTarget, Inc. (doing business as Informa TechTarget) is an American company that offers data-driven marketing services to business-to-business technology vendors. TechTarget, Inc. was founded in 1999; it is headquartered in Newton, Massachuse ...

Top 10 Cloud Computing Leader in 2010, 2011, and 2012, * 2012: Led the list of

Wired Wired may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Music * ''Wired'' (Jeff Beck album), 1976 * ''Wired'' (Hugh Cornwell album), 1993 * ''Wired'' (Mallory Knox album), 2017 * "Wired", a song by Prism from their album '' Beat Street'' * "Wired ...

's Top 10 Cloud Influencers and Thought Leaders. * 2014: ** Vogels received the inaugural Holland on the Hill

Heineken Heineken Lager Beer (), or simply Heineken (), is a Dutch pale lager beer with 5% alcohol by volume produced by the Dutch brewing company Heineken N.V. Heineken beer is sold in a green bottle with a red star. History On 15 February 1864, ...

Award for "Substantial contributions to the US-Dutch economic relationship, a commitment to innovation and support for entrepreneurs". ** AdvisoryCloud ranked Vogels Top Chief Technology Officer.

References

External links

A podcast interview with Vogels on architecture and distributed systems
Software Engineering Radio, Episode 40, Dec 2006.
All Things Distributed
personal blog {{DEFAULTSORT:Vogels, Werner 1958 births Living people Amazon (company) people American computer scientists Businesspeople in online retailing American chief technology officers Dutch computer scientists Dutch emigrants to the United States Scientists from Amsterdam Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam alumni Cornell University people The Hague University of Applied Sciences alumni