Dan Rose remembers ‘radical’ Amazon datacentre server rip and replace project
Dan Rose, former Director, Business Development at Amazon, has been reminiscing about the e-commerce giant’s early years again.
In a series of tweets, posted on 8th January, he goes back to 2000 “when the internet bubble popped. Capital markets dried up & we were burning $1B/yr.”
Amazon spent a year ripping out “expensive” Sun datacentre servers and replacing them with HP/Linux, which formed the foundation for AWS.
“Sun Microsystems was one of the most valuable companies in the world at that time (peak market cap >$300B). In those days, buying Sun was like buying IBM: nobody ever got fired for it,” Rose commented.
“Our motto was "get big fast." Site stability was critical - every second of downtime was lost sales - so we spent big $$ to keep the site up. Sun servers were the most reliable so all internet co's used them back then, even though Sun's proprietary stack was expensive & sticky.”
Rather than negotiating a better deal with Sun, founder Jeff Bezos chose “a more radical approach”, with Amazon's CTO, Rick Dalzell, pivoting the entire engineering organisation to HP/Linux.
“Linux kernel was released in '94, same year Jeff started Amzn. 6 years later we were betting the company on it, a novel and risky approach at the time,” Rose said.
Product development ground to a halt during the transition. Amazon froze all new features for over a year. “We had a huge backlog but nothing could ship until we completed the shift to Linux. I remember an all hands where one of our eng VPs flashed an image of a snake swallowing a rat,” Rose commented.
“This coincided with - and further contributed to - deceleration in revenue growth as we also had to raise prices to slow burn. It was a viscous cycle, and we were running out of time as we ran out of money. Amzn came within a few quarters of going bankrupt around this time.”
He continued: “But once we started the transition to Linux, there was no going back. All hands on deck refactoring our code base, replacing servers, preparing for the cutover. If it worked, infra costs would go down by 80%+. If it failed, the website would fall over and the company would die.”
“We finally completed the transition, just in time and without a hitch. It was a huge accomplishment for the entire engineering team. The site chugged on with no disruption. Capex was massively reduced overnight. And we suddenly had an infinitely scalable infrastructure.”
And the rest, as they say, is e-commerce history.
Check out the full Twitter thread below.
Another near death experience
Rose spent seven years at Amazon and was the first member of the Kindle e-book team, leading content acquisition and product management.
He went on to join Facebook and these days is Chairman at Coatue Ventures.
Last year, he took to Twitter to discuss how every Christmas was a near death experience for Amazon during the first seven years of its existence. Further info on that can be found here.
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