AWS Cloud History | Quick High-Level Overview
AWS Cloud History is an exciting example of modern software engineering. AWS genesis came in early 2000 as Amazon started building SOA-based architecture to scale their platform. Around that time, Amazon was launching its e-commerce platform for third-party retailers to make a web store for their retail stores. This effort of launching an e-commerce platform for third-party retailers led to the demand for a more scalable system.
Then in 2002, Amazon.com Web Services launched its first set of web services, opening the Amazon.com platform to all developers. The most exciting story is that Amazon was caught by surprise by its developers' unexpected interest in web service API.
Then in 2003, Andy Jassy, who is CEO now, put forth the idea of Internet OS made up of foundational infrastructure primitives. The first foundational infrastructure primitives — compute, storage, and databases — were identified. Based on this idea, Jeff Barr, Jassy, Bezos himself, and others formulated the concept of EC2 for computing, S3 for storage, and RDS for the database. These three are very famous AWS services now.
This [2003] was an essential year for AWS. In fact, according to Amazon Web Services Wiki, Jassy recalls brainstorming sessions for about a week with ten of the best technology minds and ten of the best product management minds on about ten different internet applications, the most primitive blocks required to build them. That discussion and other related events paved the idea of AWS, where the mission was to expose all the atomic-level pieces of the Amazon.com platform.
In 2003, Chris Pinkham and Benjamin Black presented a paper internally describing the vision for Amazon's retail infrastructure that was overhauling Amazon retail infrastructure to be completely automated and would rely extensively on web services. The paper also mentioned the possibility of selling access to virtual servers as a service and proposed that the company generate revenue from the new infrastructure investment. And after that, Chris Pinkham and lead developer Chris Brown developed the EC2 Service.
In Nov 2004, the AWS SQS was launched for public usage. This is considered the first AWS infrastructure service.
After that, in 2006, AWS started offering IT infrastructure services in Web Services. S3 was launched in Mar 2006, EC2 was launched in the same year in Aug. Over the years, many more services have been added to the AWS platform. AWS is an evolving platform – more and more features and services are continuously added to its platform.
As of this writing, AWS has over 200 products and services in almost all possible categories where AWS can offer its services.
SK Singh is the founder, a software, cloud, and data engineer. He has been involved in the software industry for around 25 years. He has a bachelor's degree in computer science and engineering from India and a master's degree in software engineering from the Pennsylvania State University. SK has been involved in a wide range of software projects for many governments, private, start-ups, and large public companies in various software engineering roles. He has many professional certifications such as AWS, Hadoop, Kafka, Oracle, Unix, Java, Java-related frameworks, and many others related.
