When you’re “an engineer who builds stuff,” like Matteo Frigo, life’s not just about perks and stock options. A lifetime of algorithmic expertise earns you access to the best people—and the hardest problems.
After architecting the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic File System a year and a half ago, Frigo wanted a new challenge. When many of his former AWS colleagues began populating Oracle’s cloud team in Seattle, Frigo’s curiosity was piqued: “At some point, I decided Amazon wasn’t for me. Then Oracle said, ‘You can be the Boston branch of Oracle Bare Metal Cloud.’”
Oracle software architect Matteo Frigo is building a team of technologists to create a data center network that makes Oracle's cloud infrastructure service unique.
Now an Oracle software architect, Frigo is applying his deep knowledge and experience—and building a team of Boston-area technologists—to create a data center network that makes the Oracle cloud infrastructure service unique. Frigo’s team relishes this kind of challenge, like working on a network that can process every packet that comes in within 10 nanoseconds.
“If you take that requirement seriously, you need a lot of engineering to get to that point. It’s not something that you can get to incrementally,” he says. “You have to get it right from the beginning.”
The team’s overarching challenge? Create what Oracle Executive Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison has called a second-generation cloud infrastructure offering. Oracle Bare Metal Cloud Services gives IT organizations all the operational control, high performance, and isolation of having its own data center, while still providing all the scalability and efficiency of a cloud. At the core of the offering is a virtual network that is much faster than customers can make themselves, Frigo says. “Giving customers the feeling that they have a network to themselves requires some secret sauce,” he says.
- Related: Oracle Developer Gateway
Part of Oracle’s approach is to let accomplished technologists like Frigo apply their experience and perspective to the right problems. Here is some of that perspective from Frigo.
On Shipping Quickly
“Most people think shipping quickly means you build something that may not be complete but provides important features,” Frigo says. “I think it means you think hard to implement a simple solution to the right problem. Many will try to solve the immediate need and not think beyond that.”
Here’s an example. When a data packet comes into any network, the system must decide: should you forward it or not? The quick implementation approach is to examine only the IP addresses for where the packet comes from and where it is going. Instead, Frigo’s team built a general-purpose pattern-matching engine that can make a decision based on any property of the packet—it might be IP addresses today, but down the road, when requirements inevitably change, it can consider other factors. “In the end, you ship faster if you focus not on the specific use case but on a more general situation that distills the essence of the problem that you are trying to solve,” Frigo says.
On Staying Motivated
“The thing that makes it fun is the interaction with brilliant people on a day-to-day basis,” Frigo says. “Half of them are PhDs from MIT. It’s a fun environment, and we’re constantly getting things done at a much faster pace than any other team I’ve worked with. There are companies that try to force things like project tracking and other nonsense that is just overhead. We do something we like, and we don’t need any external motivation.”
On Agile Methods
Frigo says Agile methods can be useful, depending on the situation. “If you are doing consulting work and the requirements aren’t clear, it makes sense to do a quick prototype,” he says. “That works for problems where the hard part is trying to figure out what to build. But there are other types of problems where the thing is hard to build. If you have to deliver something that looks like an airplane every three weeks, Agile won’t work. In Oracle Bare Metal Cloud, we have both kinds of work.”
Why Oracle? Freedom and Focus
“The first reason is that the company is that serious about Oracle Bare Metal Cloud. It’s clearly strategic, and there’s lots of support from Larry Ellison and the board. Oracle understands that building this right is crucial,” Frigo says. “Another reason is that most of the people who are architecting this cloud at Oracle have already built Amazon, Azure, or Google. We’ve all already made a ton of mistakes and are eager not to repeat them.”
As a result of Ellison’s focus, “we have a lot of freedom to do the right thing and build it right,” he says. “Having a directive from the top that orients the whole company in the direction of the cloud is a major reason to be at Oracle and not somewhere else.”
Alexandra Weber Morales, is the former editor in chief of Software Development magazine.
