It's not often that a single technical hire at a vendor merits news coverage, but when it involves a tech luminary of the likes of Java "father" James Gosling, proper attention should be paid. Gosling announced this week on his personal Facebook page that he has taken a position with Amazon Web Services, after a stint as chief software architect of Liquid Robotics.
Gosling co-created Java along with Mike Sheridan and Patrick Naughton while the three worked at Sun Microsystems in the 1980s. After Oracle bought Sun in 2010, taking control of Java, Gosling left the company, later citing issues with his salary, job responsibilities and micromanagement.
Liquid Robotics has developed an autonomous robot that traverses oceans, collecting and transmitting information about water temperature, wind speeds and other metrics. The startup's technology is used by energy companies and military organizations, among others.
It's not clear whether Gosling will be doing anything of the sort for AWS, although his background at Liquid Robotics would seem to have some synergies with IoT (Internet of Things) projects in general.
Gosling's title at AWS is distinguished engineer, a distinction handed out to relatively few people overall at the company. Distinguished engineer positions are not sinecures and AWS will undoubtedly have him working on something highly strategic.
Gosling himself declined to reveal what he'll be doing at AWS, yet suggested as much, in a Facebook post:
I've been getting a lot of questions on what I'll be working on at Amazon. Sadly, I can't say: it's Amazon's policy to be quiet. As much as secrecy can be annoying, it usually makes sense. ...Years ago I worked at IBM for a while and had to go through "confidential information" training. When I came back grumpy my manager smiled and said "IBMs biggest secret is that it has nothing worth keeping secret". Doesn't apply at Amazon. It looks like it'll be a fun ride.
AWS supports and relies upon Java for many of its services, particularly on the back end. Meanwhile, a great many on-premises enterprise workloads—ones AWS is keen to migrate—are Java-based. It's conceivable that Gosling could help lead efforts to improve Java services and tooling for AWS, and his name on the marquee won't hurt in convincing conservative enterprises to place bets with the company.
Gosling could also serve as an evangelist to the coding community. "AWS needs luminaries for the developers to look up to and he definitely is one," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "So this is a good move."
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