Author

Adrian Cockcroft

Tech Advisor · OrionX.net · verified 2026-09-04

inFollow on LinkedInX

Adrian Cockcroft is a technologist and strategist with broad experience from the bits to the boardroom, in both enterprise and consumer-oriented businesses, from startups to some of the largest companies in the world, equally at home with hardware and software, development and operations. He’s best known as the cloud architect for Netflix during their trailblazing migration to AWS and was a very early practitioner and advocate of DevOps, microservices, and chaos engineering, helping bring these concepts to the wider audience they have today. Adrian spent several years as a VP at Amazon, deeply immersed in the dual challenges of helping Amazon itself—one of the largest companies in the world—become more sustainable, and via AWS—one of the largest technology suppliers in the world—helping its enterprise and public-sector customers become more sustainable. Adrian worked at Sun Microsystems for many years and wrote the Sun Performance and Tuning book that can still be found on many technologists’ bookshelves. He was a distinguished engineer in the performance engineering team and chief architect of the High Performance Technical Computing team led by Shahin Khan. Re-joining Shahin at OrionX continues a friendship and working relationship that has been in place for decades. Adrian led the process of joining and represented Amazon on the board of both the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the Open Source Climate Foundation (OS-Climate). He’s a frequent speaker, has keynoted many AWS Global Summits, and has presented at events such as Monitorama, GOTO, YOW, QCon, and DevOps Days. He’s held advisory positions at the following companies (acquired by): DeepDyve, Liquid Robotics (Boeing), Apcera (Ericsson), Ayla Networks, NGINX (F5), Docker, Instana (IBM), Gremlin, NetAI, and Nubank.

From a paper they wrote for us, 2026