> Wow. That's a big claim.

This is all so ridiculous. As if something like this can actually be measured and all of the "contestants" are even known.

Between his time at Sun and Netflix, Cockcroft has had massive influence on architectural development practices over the past decade and a half. I'd say that his influence is more on par with folks like Wirth, Hoare and the GOF. Not nearly as obvious as the guys and gals whose influence was reified in hardware products, but still huge.

Urs?

> a single (or small set) of customers (Google, Youtube etc)

Well, the applications inside Google are equally diverse compared to applications running on AWS, or at least on the same level. Google's infrastructure is used for an extremely wide range of use cases, from running a shell command remotely, to support planetary deployment of world's largest customer-facing applications.

It was not designed for simple or uniform use cases. Actually, it is impossible to design something that is simple and uniform, and at the same can support Google's growth on the way.

Your examples, Google (search), youtube, are actually examples that have extremely diverse requirements across their entirely tech stack. In fact, many of its requirements cannot be supported in any existing public Cloud providers.

Though, to be fair, Google is investing a lot in exposing some of its internal infrastructure as a public cloud. It's a relatively late comer to that game, but that game is also just getting started.