Welcome
About Me
I’m Andrew Certain, an independent consultant and former VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services. I spent over 20 years at Amazon, working on foundational systems including EBS, DynamoDB, QLDB, EC2 networking, and many of the early Amazon.com services. I’m particularly proud of instilling a culture of caring about system latency and leading Amazon’s bar-raiser program in its early days.
This blog is a collection of my long-form tweet threads that I’ve consolidated here for easier reading and reference. Since the implosion of Twitter I haven’t really found a new social media home, and I haven’t been writing much, but below you can find my favorite posts (and, of course, you can always look through the full archive).
Featured Posts
- What does P-four-nines (p99.99) mean? - Understanding tail latency and why it matters for cloud services
- The Universal Scalability Law and the Mythical Man Month - How to keep moving fast as the team grows
- What’s Really Holding Women Back - Reflections on my promotion to VP/DE and systemic barriers in tech
- Phillip Robinson Certain, 1943 - 2020 - A tribute to my father