Top AWS Engineer Elevated To Elite Amazon Leadership Team: Report

Peter DeSantis, who played a central role in the early development of AWS cloud infrastructure, has joined the S-Team advising Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, according to CNBC.

Peter DeSantis, the engineer who leads technical development of Amazon Web Services' cloud computing infrastructure, was appointed earlier this year to the elite leadership team that advises Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, CNBC reported Wednesday.

The "S-Team" consisting of 18 senior executives meets regularly with Bezos to confer on important decisions, according to CNBC sources. CRN has reached out to Amazon for comment.

DeSantis, vice president of global infrastructure, is one of three AWS employees in the group, including his direct boss, AWS CEO Andy Jassy, and another engineer, Charlie Bell, senior vice president of utility computing services.

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DeSantis has worked at Amazon since 1998. Before the launch of AWS, he led the distributed systems engineering group that laid the foundation for Amazon's massive, industry leading cloud infrastructure division that now operates in 21 regions around the world, made up of 66 data centers called Availability Zones.

At the AWS re:Invent conference in 2017, DeSantis recounted the early days of developing Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2—the service that kicked off the public cloud revolution.

In that keynote, DeSantis spoke of Amazon's multi-year process of highly customizing the open source Xen hypervisor to meet its unique needs, and then years of hardware optimization to make the cloud computing service even more efficient as it expanded into highly redundant AWS regions around the world.

After his early work on AWS EC2 development, DeSantis was named vice president of compute services in 2006—a position he held for a decade before promotion to his current job.

For AWS partners, DeSantis joining the S-Team is great news, said Kevin RisonChu, co-founder and CTO of Stratus10, a San Diego, Calif.-based AWS partner.

"Peter DeSantis is a very talented individual and I think that his promotion to the S-Team solidifies the priority AWS will continue to play within Amazon," RisonChu said.

As a member of the team that built EC2, DeSantis helped lay the cornerstone that many other AWS Services are built on top of, he said.

Jeff Aden, executive vice president of marketing and strategic development at 2nd Watch, a Seattle-based AWS partner, said DeSantis, like fellow S-Team member Charlie Bell, "has been instrumental to the growth of AWS on the engineering delivery side."

Thanks to their work, AWS—as a standalone entity—would be the fastest growing technology company in history, and still has tremendous upside.

With 21 years at Amazon, DeSantis "lives and breathes" the company, Aden said.

And DeSantis, like Jassy and Bell, is very familiar with AWS partners, Aden added. Their combined thought leadership on the Amazon leadership team will lead to investments and innovations that benefit AWS customers and its channel.