Hello!
High Bar Solutions is a business (currently operated alone by Pete Naylor) formed to provide consultative assistance to companies (or individuals) on effective use of Amazon DynamoDB and other broader insights on data management in the cloud. Pete began his career long ago when the Internet was young, as a systems administrator for the likes of SunOS, Solaris, HPUX, BSDi, and (later) Linux. Over the years (and with Internet provider consolidation), he grew in experience and took on greater responsibility, architecting and operating large scale systems for tier 1 network providers. He managed teams of systems engineers, database administrators, built out storage area networks, and ran critical services in traditional data centers. In 2016 he joined AWS as a Technical Account Manager serving Amazon.com teams as part of their AWS account team.
In the first phase of his AWS experience, Pete supported Amazon teams in their efforts to migrate away from proprietary databases and traditional rack-based servers and into the AWS cloud (EC2) and managed database services including DynamoDB, RDS Aurora, and Redshift. The multi-year “Rolling Stone” project aimed first to move away from Oracle database products, to adopt distributed NoSQL database technology for all critical use cases, and to employ open relational databases (PostgreSQL) where more appropriate (consistent performance and scalable availability less critical, query requirements more complex and unpredictable). Pete educated hundreds of Amazon.com developer teams on these AWS database services, provided review of their designs, and supported them operationally through their first peak events (Prime Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday). While this was intense and difficult work, and sitting in the event “war rooms” could be stressful, the experience gained was invaluable. From his perspective, Pete saw the impact of DynamoDB as a fully managed (truly serverless) option for these teams - improving availability, reducing latency, and giving them back months of development time to focus on driving greater value for their customers.
Sold on the value of DynamoDB, Pete wrapped up the project with Amazon.com customers, and moved into a Specialist Solutions Architect role for DynamoDB. Supporting many of the largest external AWS customers in their own adoption and operation of DynamoDB at scale, he continued to learn about the service in depth and gained a big picture view to the variety of company starting points (development and operational cultures) and sometimes bumpy paths for database migration as part of their cloud journeys. In this phase, Pete continued to work ever more closely with the most senior engineers within DynamoDB, and worked closely with DynamoDB product managers in gathering customer feedback and influencing the product roadmap.
It was fairly natural for Pete to move into his next AWS phase as a technical product manager within the DynamoDB service team. There he dug deep into new-to-him aspects of managing one of the largest AWS businesses including feature prioritization, metering, billing, SLAs, business metrics analysis, partnering with senior developers and managers on launches, and messaging/communication of service impacts. At various stages of his time as a product manager for DynamoDB, he managed service components including documentation, developer experience, Global Tables, DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) and secondary indexing. Pete decided to move on from AWS in October 2022.
During his time as a Specialist SA and then Tech PM, Pete saw the need for guidance within the many AWS teams who back their services with DynamoDB. Those folks did not have the benefit of an account team like other Amazonians, and ensuring effective use of DynamoDB within AWS services would have cascading benefits for so many others. He built out an Office Hours program and delivered hundreds of design review sessions for AWS service development teams. This took his DynamoDB experience to a new level, with elements of complexity and variety of scaling challenges that he’d previously seen only occasionally with other DynamoDB customers.
Next stop for Pete was a startup called Momento, where he worked on taking serverless values into the caching space. The startup adventure was a great opportunity to learn, but after a year it was time for another change - time to try his own small business. And that’s the story of High Bar Solutions. Why the name? As a former Amazonian, Pete believes strongly in the Amazon leadership principles - among them “Insist on the Highest Standards”. As his father liked to say, “if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well”. Maybe there’s also some carry over from his time as a firefighter, where “Pride and Ownership” are core to being prepared to meet the needs of a community. Pete likes to participate in efforts that are pushing towards a new standard of quality, performance, optimization.