What clicks in your mind when you heard the word AWS?

It’s none other than the Sun in the sky of cloud computing.

However, the voyage from a startup to a tech giant took almost a decade. Several stories and rumors are there on the foundation of AWS. In the very early stage, Amazon Web Services was the part of Amazon.com. Today, the Infrastructure as a Service provider company becomes a tech brand with the remarkable $10 billion run rate.

If you talk about the market presence of the AWS, the company is leading the market tough other market leaders are also participating in this race. See the survey of Synergy Research.

Ideation of the AWS was started in 2000 when it was a quite different firm. Surprisingly, it was an e-commerce startup struggling with scale issues. The problems of scaling insisted the company to attain hyper growth by developing some powerful internal systems. It was the first step from Amazon that moved towards evolution of AWS.

In a summit at Washington DC, AWS CEO revealed the journey of Amazon Web Services. He explained about the core systems that were developed during the time of three years, 2000-2003. He admitted while working on these systems, the team never realized that they were moving ahead something very momentous.

Development of Internal Systems

In the very initial phase, Amazon thought to unveil an e-commerce service called Marchant.com. The plan was to facilitate the 3rd party merchants to develop online shopping sites on the Amazon’s e-commerce engine.

However, later on, they realized it was quite harder to build up such an external system as it was not compatible with long term future requirements. They created a jumbled mess rather than a structured development environment. To create a centralized and organized development platform, they had to separate their various services.

Here the company took a step ahead to build up AWS by untangling the mess into a set of documented APIs. While it worked smoother for Marchant.com, they implemented it for the internal staff of the company too.

“So very quietly around 2000, we became a services company with really no fanfare.”

– Andy Jassy, AWS CEO

During the same time, as the company was growing quickly, they were hiring new professionals. But they were not able to achieve fasten application development. Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos realized this issue while he confronted a running complaint.

A team of executives supposed to complete a project within three months. But, he noticed it was taking three months in building storage or compute instances and database only. He observed everyone was preparing their own resources for an individual project, with no thoughts of reuse or scale.

He realized Amazon staff had to plan out a set of common infrastructure services so that everyone could access the data without reinventing the wheel now and then. Here the company felt they have to think something bigger.

Formation of an Amazing Idea

In 2003, Jessy asked his executives to conduct an exercise that was to identify company’s core competencies. As a result, they came to know their exceptional competency in terms of running infrastructure services such as storage, database and compute. Amazon staff was already performing excellent in serving to a large range of products as well as fulfilling and shipping orders.

Additionally, they came to know about their skills at running cost-effective, reliable, and scale data centers. Being a startup, they had to be as efficient and lean as possible.

Thus, the idea of AWS started to formulate, and they began to find if they had an additional business providing infrastructure service to developers.

“In retrospect it seems fairly obvious, but at the time I don’t think we had ever really internalized that.”

– Andy Jassy, AWS CEO

Advanced Internet Operating System

In the summer of 2003, they had thought to launch a set of internet operating system. But, execution of the idea took time.

“If you believe companies will build applications from scratch on top of the infrastructure services if the right selection [of services] existed, and we believed they would if the right selection existed, then the operating system becomes the internet, which is really different from what had been the case for the [previous] 30 years,”

– Andy Jassy, AWS CEO

In the Fall of 2003, the company concluded that this was a green technology field where all the components needed to run the internet OS had yet to be build.

“We realized we could contribute all of those key components of that internet operating system, and with that we went to pursue this much broader mission, which is AWS today, which is really to allow any organization or company or any developer to run their technology applications on top of our technology infrastructure platform.”

– Andy Jassy, AWS CEO

Then, the company started working on this direction, and the rest is history. After few years, the company introduced their Infrastructure as a Service. No doubt, it took a considerable amount of time, but now it is one of the most lucrative businesses.

In 2006, AWS officially launched a modern cloud infrastructure called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. AWS was the single player in this market for a long way, so the company holds the major market share. However, today Microsoft, Google, IBM and other are participating in cloud competition strongly. For the Amazon’s incredible success and achievement, Jassy said

“I don’t think any of us had the audacity to predict it would grow as big or as fast as it has.”

So, it was a quite interesting journey. Amazon has built and utilized the cloud platform since pretty long. And they saw to the tech industry, nothing less than the future of computing.

Intuz feels proud to be the part of such a huge cloud network. Being an AWS Consulting Partner, we offer a wide range of Amazon cloud services starts from migration, deployment, consultation, cost analysis, DevOps, and disaster recovery. Looking for an authenticated cloud service provider? Speak to our AWS certified professionals.