Adrian Cockcroft is a technologist and strategist with broad experience from the bits to the boardroom, in both enterprise and consumer-oriented businesses, from startups to some of the largest companies in the world, equally at home with hardware and software, development and operations. He’s best known as the cloud architect for Netflix during their trailblazing migration to AWS and was a very early practitioner and advocate of DevOps, microservices, and chaos engineering, helping bring these concepts to the wider audience they have today.
He spent the last few years as a VP at Amazon deeply immersed in the dual challenges of helping Amazon itself - one of the largest companies in the world - become more sustainable, and via AWS - one of the largest technology suppliers in the world - helping its enterprise and public sector customers become more sustainable. With European regulations in place, and the US following a similar path, most large organizations are confronted with new requirements to report on their ability to operate sustainably, and the physical and transition risks they face.
There is an industry wide fascination with the success of both Netflix and Amazon, their culture and ideas, and Adrian has been distilling these learnings and sharing them with executives for many years. The Cloud for CEOs booklet - Measure Innovation with One Metric - 2019 is a short summary of his thoughts.
Adrian worked at Sun Microsystems for many years and wrote the Sun Performance and Tuning book that can still be found on many technologist’s bookshelves. He was a distinguished engineer in the performance engineering team and chief architect of the High Performance Technical Computing team led by Shahin Khan. Re-joining Shahin as a Partner and Analyst at OrionX continues a friendship and working relationship that has been in place for decades.
Adrian led the process of joining and represented Amazon on the board of both the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and the Open Source Climate foundation (OS-Climate). He was previously an independent board member for European IT service provider Trifork, and while at Sun, helped form the Enterprise Grid Alliance. He’s been a member of the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) since 2016.
He's held past advisory positions at the following companies (acquired by): DeepDyve, Liquid Robotics (Boeing), Apcera (Ericsson), Ayla Networks, NGINX (F5), Docker, Instana (IBM), Gremlin, and will announce some additional advisory positions soon.
Adrian has a BSc in Applied Physics and Electronics from The City University, London, UK. He’s a frequent speaker and keynoted many events for AWS including many of the AWS Global Summit series, and has presented at many events such as the Monitorama, GOTO, YOW, QCon and DevOps Days conferences.
Follow Adrian on Twitter @adrianco and LinkedIn at /adriancockcroft.