Lee Atchison

Thought Leader, Cloud Expert, Application Modernization Expert, Author at O'Reilly Media, LinkedIn Learning, and InfoWorld.

Lee Atchison is a recognized industry thought leader in cloud computing. He has committed his career to architecting and building high-scale, cloud-based, service-oriented SaaS applications. He has specific expertise in building highly available systems.

Lee is the author of the best-selling book Architecting For Scale, published by O’Reilly Media. The book, originally released in 2016, recently went through a major upgrade and was released as the second edition in 2020.

He was the Senior Director for Cloud Architecture at New Relic. He was with New Relic for eight years, where, among other things, he designed and led the building of the New Relic Platform and infrastructure products. As architect lead, Lee has helped New Relic build a solid service-based system architecture that scales as they have grown from a simple SaaS startup to a high-traffic public enterprise.

Lee learned cloud-based, scalable systems while working for seven years as a Senior Manager and Principal Program Manager at Amazon.com. At Amazon, he led the creation of the company’s first software download store (app store), created the AWS Elastic Beanstalk offering (Platform as a Service), and led the team that managed the migration of Amazon’s retail platform from a monolith to an SOA-based architecture.

Lee is widely quoted in publications such as InfoWorld, Container Journal, Diginomica, IT Brief, Programmable Web, CIO Review, and DZone. He has been a featured speaker at events across the globe, from London to Sydney, Tokyo to Paris, and all over North America.

Additionally, Lee spent several years in the network management space working for two different startups and twelve years in the Test & Measurement space at Hewlett Packard. At Hewlett Packard, among other things, he led standardization work for key IEEE and industry standards in the T&M sector and wrote a book on building T&M software systems published by Prentice Hall.

Overall, Lee has 33 years of industry experience. He has worked in companies of all sizes, from very small startups to very large corporate enterprises (such as Hewlett Packard) and all sizes in between. He is the holder of multiple patents while working at both Amazon and Hewlett Packard.

You can see some of Lee's articles, publications, speaking sessions, webinars, and podcast episodes by visiting his personal website, leeatchison.com.