Self LLC

The genesis of Amazon Web Services (AWS) dates back to the early 2000s. After building Merchant.com, Amazon's e-commerce-as-a-service platform, Amazon recognized the need for a more scalable and service-oriented architecture to support its engineering operations. This internal need, coupled with the realization that developers were eager for more robust web services, laid the groundwork for what would become a global cloud computing leader. In July 2002, Amazon.com Web Services launched its first web services, opening up the Amazon.com platform to developers. By 2003, a vision for Amazon's infrastructure emerged – one that was completely standardized, automated, and reliant on web services. This vision was championed by individuals like Benjamin Black and Chris Pinkham, and Jeff Bezos approved experimentation with this new infrastructure model.

The official launch of AWS as a cloud computing platform occurred in 2006, with the introduction of key services like Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) in March and Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) in August. These initial offerings provided businesses with on-demand IT infrastructure, a concept now commonly known as cloud computing. The idea was to empower anyone, from a startup in a dorm room to large enterprises, with access to the same powerful technology. Over the years, AWS has relentlessly expanded its portfolio, growing from a few foundational services to over 200 fully featured services across computing, storage, databases, analytics, networking, machine learning, IoT, and more. This growth was fueled by a customer-centric approach, working backward from customer problems to deliver innovative cloud solutions. Key milestones include the launch of Amazon SQS in 2004 (publicly available), the introduction of services like Elastic Block Store and CloudFront in 2009, and the migration of Amazon.com's own retail web services to AWS. The platform's success led to significant profitability for Amazon, with AWS becoming more profitable than Amazon's North American retail business by 2016. Today, AWS powers hundreds of thousands of businesses in 190 countries and is recognized as the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform.