Cloud Native, Digital Identity, and Universal Control Plane with Andrew Baker
Speakers

Cloud Native, Digital Identity, and Universal Control Plane
When today’s guest thought about what the future held for him, culture fit was top of mind. It matters greatly that our value systems align with that of the companies we work for, especially in terms of not being domain-driven and learning from and collaborating with other teams.
In this episode, we interview Andrew Baker, Director of Engineering, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) at AWS, about the rigorous interview process, what attracted him to AWS, and why culture was a major criterion in his decision.
Join us as we discuss:
- What happened at Barclays with algorithmic trading
- The draw to be a part of an organization
- Andrew’s views on cloud native and no code
Andrew Baker, Director of Engineering, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), at AWS.
Your attitude toward lifelong learning is probably more critical than the accrued knowledge with which you enter a new organization.
Do you agree?
Amazon does.
Andrew Baker discovered a culture of learning during his own journey to becoming the Director of Engineering, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), at AWS.
Andrew’s brilliance struck early on — during his AS level in Statistics, in fact, when he got the best score in his county.
It’s no surprise, then, that he has come this far, and has some brilliant advice for you, which he shares candidly on the latest episode of The Agile CTO:
✔️ Embrace the creative freedom that comes with maths.
✔️ Be willing to apply yourself in constantly improving existing solutions, as well as in developing new ones.
✔️ Work alongside customers and fellow teammates. Eradicate the ‘us vs them’ mentality.
✔️ There’s a time and place to use low- and no-code. It’s not all the time and it’s definitely not every place.
Key Insights
The draw to be part of an organisation
Andrew’s views on cloud-native and no-code
Parting advice from Andrew
Episode Highlights
- “Find a company where the culture matches your value system and how you would like to work. I would say that’s probably the most important thing.”
- “From a cloud perspective, the thing that's really interesting to me right now is digital identity and a universal control plane.”
- “My view is that you work with the customer, always with the customer. Don't sit off on a side and try to build something. I'm not a fan of that at all.”