Our Origins

Overview

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.

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      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. Find out who were some of the first customers to use Amazon S3 »

      Our origins

      Find out more about the origins of AWS

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      10 things you need to know about AWS CEO Matt Garman

      Garman was AWS’s first product manager, helped build and launch a slew of core services, understands what it means to listen to customers, and stresses that security will always be the company’s number one priority.
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      Firing up cloud machines like ‘elves on roller skates’

      Why South Africa was the perfect place to change computing forever. There is a saying among South Africans that boils down to this: A farmer makes a plan. "It's an expression everybody knows and kind of lives by,"
      said James Greenfield, VP of software engineering at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Cape Town, South Africa.

      Videos

      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)
      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