Bangalore: “A man can change his stars” said Heath Ledger as the character William, in the movie ‘A Knight’s Tale.’

In the late 70’s and early 80’s he worked as a licensed auto mechanic first at a Chevrolet dealer and later at, Eurocar, an Alfa Romeo dealership where they serviced Maseratti, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Alfa Romeo and, just to keep the bills paid, Fiats. The same man left the car business to do some seminal work on IBM’s DB2 database and later on Microsoft’s SQL Server. While working as an architect in Microsoft’s research group called the Data Center Futures team, he was smitten by the bug, and in 2009, he moved to Amazon.

Today James Hamilton is the man who ensures that Amazon web services’ data centers function effectively and efficiently without any failure.

On Monday in August 2011, when a 10 million watt transformer exploded in Northern Virginia, Amazon’s data center‘s main power supply was also knocked out.

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