“He’s really sharp,” says Adrian Cockcroft, the director of cloud architecture at Netflix, Amazon’s most high-profile customer. “He’s been around a long time, built a lot of interesting stuff.”

About four years ago, James and Jennifer Hamilton sold their house and their car and most of their worldly possessions, and they moved onto the Dirona. Now, when he’s docked in Seattle, Hamilton bikes to Amazon headquarters, does his shopping via Amazon Prime, and picks up his mail at the local UPS store. Sometimes, he takes the boat to Hawaii — and works from there. If any confusion still persists then, the Dirona is a yatch and The Hamiltons home. In short he not only changed his career path but he also redefined his life.

Amazon has built data centers around the globe, everywhere from Brazil to Singapore to Ireland. They spend $4.5 billion on technology and content in 2012 alone, and while the company doesn’t say how much it spends on data centers, its AWS build-out now accounts for the majority of the $1.6 billion bump in technology and content spending it saw last year. With such an amount of money riding on something this important, Amazon needs someone reliable and highly qualified for the job – they have found just that in James along with a touch of ingenuity for sweeps.

Also Read: 10 Pioneers Of Cloud Computing

Also Read: IBM to Renew its Biggest Indian IT Contract, Faces Stiff Competition