Ari Zilka founded Terracotta in 2003, where he currently serves as the infrastructure software company’s CTO. There he’s been working to refine the software that makes it easy to scale a Java application to as many computers as needed, without the usual custom application code and databases used to share data in a cluster. Prior to Terracotta, Ari was the Chief Architect at Walmart.com, where he led the innovation and development of the company’s new engineering initiatives. While there, he built and led a team of core engineers focused on performance management, and operations cost-saving measures. Outside of Walmant.com, Ari’s work in software development and consulting has had him working with Gap.com, Nike.com, Harrod’s of London, Siemen’s, Intel, Compaq, and Barnes & Noble among others.

In June 2008, Ari and the Terracotta development team celebrated the release of the first commercially-available book about the technology, “The Definitive Guide to Terracotta: Cluster the JVM for Spring, Hibernate and POJO Scalability”. The book was written for both developers and architects who want to learn the “whats, wheres, whens, and whys” of the Terracotta scaling engine.

Ari holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering Computer Science as well as in Mechanical Engineering from University of California, Berkeley.