Everyone knows AWS started the cloud computing industry. AWS has changed how businesses and customers work worldwide, from small startups to Apple Computers. Cloud computing is now everywhere, thanks to Amazon.
But how does the idea of the cloud come to mind?
Our story starts In early 2000, Amazon was trying to survive the dot-com bubble. What was Amazon’s biggest expense at the time? Data centres and servers.
Amazon used Sun Microsystems servers until 1999. It was expensive but the most reliable. So, most of Amazon’s IT costs were going to server licensing.
It was very hard for Amazon to sustain that much outgoing cost.
Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy played one of the biggest gambles of Amazon’s life, and it changed the history of the IT industry.
They decided to move to #linux to save on licensing costs. Although no one was sure how the native applications would turn out on Linux or how much downtime would happen during the migration. Site availability is a matter of life and death for any e-commerce business.
The transition took one year. Amazon had a hard year because the economy was slowing and it had to keep going while also building new things.
But all of the hard work paid off when new infrastructure became available; with Linux, the operating IT costs have been drastically reduced.
During the transition, Jeff and Jessi realized Amazon and partner merchants were spending way too much time and money building the same old infrastructure—#storage and #database solutions—over and over again.
In addition, traffic for Amazon was seasonal, peaking in November and December. At this point, Jeff and Jessi started to think that Amazon had excess capacity for 46 weeks of the year. Why not rent the excess capacity to other businesses? Leadership liked the idea, and they started working on it.
Initially, 57 people on the AWS team were working as a startup inside a big company. Arguably, the birth of AWS is the best “#intrapreneurship” venture of our time.
Fortunately, Jassi and the AWS team began seriously considering how the business would look under a much broader mission: allowing developers to build their tech infrastructure on top of an Amazon-built cloud computing platform from the start. which helped them build a scalable, robust environment for future expansion.
In 2006, Amazon launched the first public cloud service, Simple Storage Service (S3).
And the rest is history…!!
Today, the cloud computing industry is worth more than $500 billion, and AWS is a key player of it.
Amazon became a $1 trillion company, and AWS is an important contributor to it.
All of this started with a single #infrastructure#migration…!