Who Is Andy Jassy? Jeff Bezos Acolyte Moves From Cloud to Amazon CEO

Date: 03‑02‑2021

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Incoming chief executive turned Amazon’s cloud computing into industry, company’s most profitable business

Andy Jassy has been the chief architect and evangelist of Amazon Web Services.

Andy Jassy, the Amazon. com Inc. leader who is set to take over as chief executive from founder Jeff Bezos later this year, is a longtime acolyte of his boss who helped come up with the tech giant’s most profitable idea: cloud‑computing.

Since Amazon Web Services launched in 2006, Mr. Jassy, 53, has been its chief architect and evangelist, building the business from a nascent idea that was widely questioned in the technology community to a multibillion‑dollar business that dominates the internet.

After joining Amazon in 1997 and helping what was then a small online bookseller to expand its catalog to CDs, he began shadowing Mr. Bezos as a technical assistant in the early 2000s. In 2003, he found himself in a brainstorming session in Mr. Bezos’ living room. There, they cooked up the idea together to build the cloud‑computing platform now known as AWS.