AWS Elastic File System GM Jumps To Google As New VP

‘After almost four years at AWS on the EFS team, it is time for a new adventure,’ says Duncan Lennox, Google’s new vice president of engineering.

Duncan Lennox, general manager of Amazon Web Services’ Elastic File System (EFS), has left to join Google as its new vice president of engineering.

“After almost four years at AWS on the EFS team, it is time for a new adventure,” said Lennox in a recent LinkedIn post. “Now on to something new with Google, helping out with Site Reliability Engineering across many of their consumer platforms.”

Lennox led Amazon’s Elastic File System group for the past two years, which is the company’s cloud storage solution that allows Amazon EC2 instance, AWS Lambda functions and containers to share access to a fully managed file system. EFS is at the heart of the AWS platform and is used in a wide array of applications.

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Lennox is now vice president of engineering for site reliability and consumer platforms for Google. He could not be reached for comment by press time.

Google and Amazon compete head-to-head in the massive public cloud market in many categories, including cloud storage, via Google Cloud and AWS. The cloud giants are two of the three largest spenders on data centers in the world, as demand for cloud services is skyrocketing across the globe.

In terms of Google’s site reliability engineering market momemtum, Google Cloud last week unveiled a five-year strategic partnership with BT to accelerate BT’s digital transformation efforts, which included access to Google Cloud’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team.

“By deploying our full cloud capabilities, and support from our SRE organization, our goal in this partnership is to set up BT with the tools it needs for future growth and innovation,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud in a statement last week.

Lennox was previously director of product management for EFS at AWS before being promoted to general manager in 2020. AWS EFS delivers low latency performance for a variety of workloads and can scale to thousands of concurrent customers or connections.

He is also the former CEO and co-founder of Qstream, a mobile sales enablement and analytics company, for ten years until he joined AWS in 2018.

“I was fortunate to partner with some of the smartest folks I have ever worked with during my time at Amazon, and I am incredibly grateful for the experience and all they taught me,” said Lennox.