San Francisco - A creator of Amazon.com’s cloud-services operation has joined Twitter to help keep its website running smoothly.
Chris Pinkham started as a vice-president of engineering at the social media service in January.
San Francisco-based Twitter has been reworking its engineering department to help the company expand and release products more quickly. The company promoted Alex Roetter last May to be head of engineering with a mandate to improve the site’s performance. Twitter used to crash so often that it had a Fail Whale icon, an image of little birds attempting to lift a large cetacean, it could trot out with an apology to users when their pages wouldn’t load.
Pinkham led cloud development at Oracle after the database company acquired his startup, Nimbula in 2013.
Before that, he worked at Amazon, where he conceived of and co-built the earliest incarnation of the Amazon Web Services elastic compute cloud, which provides customised computing capacity. Amazon Web Services is estimated to be a multibillion-dollar a year business for the Seattle-based company, which is due to start reporting sales for the operation at the end of April.
Amazon Web Services helped fuel the rise of the cloud-computing industry, with companies such as Microsoft and Google developing similar products. The industry has challenged network-hardware vendors such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard.
At Twitter, Pinkham is seeking to hire “people who are interested in building some of the most important infrastructure on the planet”, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Bloomberg