AWS launched the first cloud-based virtual computer, EC2, 15 years ago on August 25, 2006. Cloud computing and infrastructure as a Service are a common way that businesses use computing today, but it was not a widely known concept.
Elastic Compute is the acronym for Elastic Compute in EC2. This name was deliberately chosen. It was designed to give you as much computing power as you need to complete a job and then to shut it off when you don't use it, making it elastic like an elastic band. Six months before the launch of EC2, beta, S3 storage was released in beta. Both services were the beginning of AWS' cloud infrastructure journey.
These moves were so important that Amazon can't be overestimated. It was able anticipate a completely new way of computing, and created a market and substantial side businesses in the process. It took vision to see what was ahead, and courage to move forward and invest the necessary resources to make it happen. This is something every business can learn from.
Although the AWS story is complicated, it was all about sharing the IT power of Amazon to other businesses. Although Amazon was not the company it is today, it was still a substantial business. It had to cope with huge fluctuations in traffic like Black Friday which saw its website flood with traffic for a brief but sustained time. Although the ultimate goal of any e-commerce website, as with all businesses, is to attract as many customers as possible it takes work to keep the site running under such stress. Amazon was already learning how to do this well.
These lessons, along with a desire for the company to improve its internal development processes, would eventually result in what we now know as Amazon Web Services. This side business would fuel a whole new generation of startups. To learn more about this technological shift, we spoke with Dave Brown, VP of EC2 and the person who built the first versions.
Sometimes you get a great notion
AWS was born in 2000 when AWS began to look at ways to make software production easier. They eventually developed a foundational set of services that could be used by every developer.
The idea to sell this set of services was first conceived at an executive offsite held at Jeff Bezos' house in 2003. A TechCrunch 2016 article about the origins of AWS explained how this happened.
Jassy said that the team had become very proficient in running infrastructure services such as storage, compute, and database. This was due to previously defined internal requirements. They were also able to run reliable, scalable and cost-effective data centres out of necessity. They had to be efficient and lean as possible as Amazon is a low-margin company.
They realized that their skills and abilities could be used to start a side-business that would eventually become AWS. Although it took some time to implement their initial ideas, they opened an engineering office in South Africa by December 2004 to start building what would be EC2. Brown explains that the company was seeking to expand beyond Seattle at the time. Chris Pinkham, then the director, was from South Africa and wanted a return to his homeland.
