Casper Coertze leads AWS Aurora organisation’s Berlin office, where his teams build the distributed storage and database systems behind Amazon Aurora. Before joining Aurora, Casper spent five years as leading EC2 Instance Placement, responsible for the systems that decide where every EC2 instance in the world runs, a placement problem spanning millions of servers with strict availability requirements. With 15 years in the industry, his career centres on highly available distributed systems at scale: how they fail, how they recover, and how to design them so customers never notice either.