Our Origins

In the early days of operating Amazon.com we experienced first-hand how hard and expensive it was to provision and manage IT infrastructure, and how this distracted talented teams from actually innovating. That’s why we launched Amazon Web Services in the spring of 2006, to rethink IT infrastructure completely, so that anyone—even a kid in a college dorm room— could access the same powerful technology as the world’s largest and most sophisticated companies. Since those early days, we’ve never stopped inventing on behalf of our customers—from storage to networking, to serverless, to machine learning, to custom silicon and hardware, and generative AI.

Visit our blog for the latest news from AWS »

Hear from our first CEO, Andy Jassy, on the creation of AWS

A breakthrough in IT infrastructure

With the launch of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) in 2006, AWS solved a major problem its potential customers faced: how to store data while keeping it highly secure and maintaining privacy and control. A few months later, the launch of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) gave customers instant access to computer processing power—a service that over time would ensure that anything that could have been done with a massive data center, could be done remotely with practically the click of a button. These initial offerings from AWS marked the beginning of our commitment to democratize access to technology, a commitment that continues today as we remove barrier after barrier for our customers so they are free to invent and build whatever they can imagine.

Don McAskill, CEO of SmugMug, on how Amazon S3 changed his company’s trajectory (1:31)
Werner Vogels and Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, on the creation of Amazon S3 (4:16)

Find out more about the origins of AWS

Tough customers: When startups and Amazon Web Services met
15 Years of EC2 Innovation: James Hamilton
Building on 15 years of compute innovation

Learn more about AWS

Our Values

We believe in building technology that's inclusive, diverse, and equitable.

Our Communities

We're committed to making a positive impact wherever we operate in the world.

Our People

We set out every day to innovate and disrupt the status quo on behalf of our customers and partners. We pride ourselves on pursuing unexpected paths and seeing things from different perspectives.

Our Customers and Partners

Thousands of customers and partners around the world use AWS to solve some of the world's biggest challenges.