Pat Helland is leaving Microsoft, Changes in My Life “On January 24th, Amazon approached me to work helping their systems and applications become more scalable and fault tolerant. I swear, I was just plugging away going to work when they asked me to come and visit! Amazon has embraced the need to migrate to service oriented architecture and wants me to help in that effort. I have worked almost 27 years on platforms for enterprise applications but have never worked on an actual application. Amazon has one of the world's largest and most challenging applications. The difficulties involved in keeping the application available are both technical and social. Working on this provides me with the opportunity to see if my ideas work and to learn from real world deployments. This is a wonderful chance to make a difference in a new way“.
I thought Pat might have had a future in the Entertainment business, but then again maybe all those CIO's are still protecting their turf. Pat's work on Microsoft's .Net Architecture Center has been an inspiration to so many of us who never understood the need for a CIO.
Pat's paper Metropolis - A metaphor for the evolution of information technology into the world of service-oriented architectures, may have gotten him hired by Amazon and I hope he keeps blogging so we can all continue to learn from his experience.