Khawaja Shams

Head of Engineering for NoSQL, Amazon

Khawaja Shams is the Head of Engineering for NoSQL at Amazon Web Services. He is a passionate distributed systems engineer, loves to code, and all it takes to distract him is a refreshing discussion around coding a new distributed systems app. Together, Swami and Khawaja are on a mission to redefine NoSQL, again! Khawaja also serves as the Technical Assistant to Charlie Bell, VP of Utility Computing at AWS. Prior to joining Amazon, Khawaja led the Data Services team at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he owned distributed systems for tactical operations of dozens of missions across NASA including the Curiosity Mars rover, Voyager, Deep Space Network, Cassini, and International Space Station. Khawaja was one of the key leaders influencing cloud adoption across NASA and advised multiple government agencies and enterprises on Cloud Computing. Khawaja owned development of the data processing pipelines for all Mars images as they are beamed backed to earth and pushed out to global community of scientist, operators, as well as the public. @ksshams

NoSQL Like There is No Tomorrow Location: Grand Ballroom - Salon A/B/C/D Abstract:

Amazon.com runs some of the world's largest distributed systems at scale. Much of the internet relies on these services to be highly available, performant, and to scale virtually limitlessly. This session will be a deep dive into the history of NoSQL at Amazon.com, from the world of relational databases, to the Dynamo days, to the world of managed services like DynamoDB. We will cover lessons we learned facing Amazon Web Services, as well as internal services that power much of Amazon.com and AWS behind the scenes. Come learn how our distributed systems evolved over the last decade to take on their current form and hear insights that will help you get a running start with yours. We cover deployment practices, testing and modeling methodologies, as well as how we continuously improve operations every day.