The True Story of the Creation of Amazon AWS

In the history of computing, the internet and the web, there are countless myths and legends, most of them based on a kernel of truth, but sometimes so embellished that the legend ends up taking precedence over reality.

This is notably what happened with the story of the creation of Amazon Web Services, a tale that often serves as inspiration for entrepreneurs, but which, in the end, is far from the true story.

The myth

Let's start from the beginning, and first remember that Amazon was launched in 1994 with the goal of being the largest bookstore in the world, selling only books until 1998.

After adding CDs and DVDs to its platform, a logical evolution for an online bookstore, the company began to move beyond purely cultural products by selling cosmetics and hygiene products starting in 2000, becoming a general-purpose marketplace.

Sales during the 1999 Christmas season were so explosive that Amazon reached a record figure of $2.6 billion in products sold during the year, something never seen before.

The problem was that the Christmas holiday season was so intense for Amazon that the company had to multiply its data centers in order to support the user load required for this period to go smoothly, to the point that for the rest of the year these additional machines were barely used at all.

Investing over several years in machines and server infrastructure useful for only one month a year proved extremely costly for Amazon, which found itself throwing money out the window.

In 2002, an engineer supposedly proposed making the computing and storage power profitable by creating a virtual server rental service billed by the minute of use per machine.

The service would be called AWS; ten years later (2013) it would generate $3 billion, reaching a figure of $45 billion in 2020, becoming Amazon's most profitable subsidiary.

This is the legend that tells how, thanks to "Christmas magic," AWS came into being.

The reality

Unfortunately, this story in which a struggling Amazon finds a creative solution that exceeds all expectations and revolutionizes the world of cloud computing is very inspiring, but it is false.

I wasn't able to find the starting point of this legend, but what is certain is that it has been debunked several times by engineers and managers who were present during the creation of Amazon's AWS division, and all their accounts agree:

While the company was hitting record numbers in 2000, engineers were working flat out on standardizing and abstracting web services within Amazon so that the platform could continue to scale as simply as possible.

The goal was to create a set of independent internal web services in order to avoid bottlenecks and make it easier to develop new tools.

In 2003, Benjamin Black and Chris Pinkham presented a paper to Jeff Bezos compiling the full specification of the future architecture, notably inspired by the preliminary work of several Amazon engineers working on the subject.

Each building block of the infrastructure is independent, standardized, and the deployment phase is designed to be fully automated. At the end of the paper, Chris Pinkham slipped in the idea of offering access to private virtual servers as a standalone product.

In 2004, Amazon launched its first web services S3, SQS and EC2, but it wasn't until 2006 that everything was officially relaunched under the unified "AWS" banner. Here is a video of Jeff Bezos confirming this story:

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Source: http://blog.b3k.us/2009/01/25/ec2-origins.html

Granted, this version is far less romantic than the first one, but above all it reflects the incredible work of the engineers, working hand in hand to accomplish major internal challenges and arrive at a solution so well thought out that it could be turned into a standalone product, and not some supposed stroke of genius the day after Christmas!

In the end, when you take a technical look at this story, isn't this version actually even more interesting?

I hope you enjoyed this article, and see you soon on the blog.