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. \n
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 »
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Firing up cloud machines like ‘elves on roller skates’
said James Greenfield, VP of software engineering at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Cape Town, South Africa.