March 14, 2006 was the beginning of a new era in computing. That was the day that Amazon Web Services released the Simple Storage Service (S3). Technically, Simple Queuing Services was released earlier but it was the release of S3 that really lit the fire under cloud computing. I remember that day well. At the time I was General Manager of Frontbridge Technologies, a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft that provided cloud hosted email antispam, antimalware, and archiving services. From this experience, I felt like I understood the customer value of cloud hosted services. I knew customers loved the speed of provisioning and low cost so, in many ways, I was already a convert. I already felt pretty sure that cloud hosting was the future.
But still the Amazon Simple Storage Service announcement was an eye opener for me. The technology industry has 100s of announcements each day and I don’t look at many. For the most part, they are uninteresting. But the S3 announcement was game changing. Most startling was the cost of the service. It was nearly 2 orders of magnitude less expensive than we were currently paying for multi-data center redundant storage. But what was even more disruptive was a credit card was all that was needed to provision storage. There was no required proposal for financial approval, there was no RFP, no vendor selection process, no vendor negotiation, and no data center space need be found. I could just sign up and start working.
What was at least as notable as the low cost and ease of provisioning was that the announcement came from Amazon rather than a traditional enterprise IT player. Rather than a company that is dedicated to high margins, difficult negotiations, and sometimes even license usage audits, this service came from Amazon. What looks to be “large” margins at Amazon would have shareholders at most enterprise IT companies calling for immediate management change. This really was different. A different supplier, a different model, a low friction provisioning path, and a fundamentally different price that starts low and falls rather than escalates over time.
The S3 announcement generated industry-wide interest and wonderment on how it would be possible, for even a very high volume supplier, to not lose money on every single byte sold. I was completely captivated by the offering and ended up writing several thousand lines of code using S3 as the underlying storage system. At times it was a bit clunky, there was the odd sharp edge, but writing the app really established in my mind that this was the beginning of something big.
From deciding to write the app to it being up and running was measured in days and, after debugging and testing extensively, the end of the month rolled around and I got my Visa bill. Of course, I knew abstractly that S3 was disruptively priced but when I saw that my bill for the entire development and test of this application was $3.08, it just seemed wrong. Once development was complete I was still storing all the test data in S3 so the following month I got a bill for $0.07.
This was so game changing that wrote it up, blogged it internally where I worked, and demoed it to company leadership including the CTO and CEO. My presentation included a picture of Al Vermeulen, one of the early developers on S3, showed some of how S3 worked and, to underline my point that this really was different, I included my two AWS bills. My key point was this wasn’t just a stunt or a fun little experiment by Amazon but was really a fundamental new way of delivering infrastructure services. Storage was first but compute was to follow shortly.
I got increasingly interested in AWS and by 2007 was attending user group meetings, doing presentations at Amazon, and eventually I just gave up and joined the team in late 2008.
As a member of the AWS engineering team, my first impressions are probably best summarized as fast. Decisions are made quickly. New ideas end up in code and available to customers at a speed that just makes the pace of enterprise IT look like continental drift. In a previous role, I remember (half) jokingly saying “we ship twice a decade whether customers need it or not.” Now new features are going out so frequently they are often hard to track.
Another interesting aspect of AWS is how product or engineering debates are handled. These arguments come up frequently and are as actively debated at AWS as at any company. These decisions might even be argued with more fervor and conviction at AWS but its data that closes the debates and decisions are made remarkably quickly. At AWS instead of having a “strategy” and convincing customers that is what they really need, we deliver features we find useful ourselves and we invest quickly in services that customers adopt broadly. Good services become great services fast.
In some of my past roles, I’ve seen these healthy debates become bigger than life and end up dragging on unproductively for years. At AWS they are resolved in days with customer usage data and the focus swings quickly to execution. It’s really refreshing to have the normal debate to delivery equation turned upside down. Most of the effort at AWS ends up in customer hands whereas, at many jobs I’ve held, much of the effort is in bringing these competing internal efforts to resolution. The AWS speed of delivery is great for customers and I find it an exciting environment for engineers.
The best proof of innovation is customer commitment and, without a doubt, the highest form of customer commitment is to decide to run the entire company on cloud infrastructure. Netflix was the first to publically make the decision to go 100% cloud. Some of my favorite examples of cloud “all in” corporate commitments:
2010 Netflix
2013 Kempinski Hotels
2013 Suncorp Group
2014 Infor
2014 Nippon Express
2014 Notre Dame University
2014 National Democratic Institute
2015 The Guardian Media Group
From my perspective, the companies that have decided to go with cloud only infrastructure are the most interesting and the most compelling examples of the massive change sweeping the industry. But, as an example of the AWS speed of innovation, check out some of the highlights over the last decade:
2006
2006 Amazon S3
2006 Amazon SQS
2006 Amazon EC2
2007
2007 AWS introduces commerce platform for AWS, rapidly accelerating adoption, Amazon FPS
2007 Amazon S3 in EMEA
2007 Amazon Simple DB
2008
2008 pricing plan for Amazon SQS and new WSDL (1st price drop)
2008 Elastic IP Addresses
2008 Availability Zones for EC2
2008 AWS adds Premium (enterprise) support
2008 AWS Lowers Data Transfer Costs
2008 Amazon Elastic Block Storage
2008 EC2 SLA and GA, EC2 for Windows, EC2 for SQL Server
2008 New Tiered Pricing for Amazon S3
2008 Amazon CloudFront
2008 EC2 in Europe (Ireland)
2009
2009 AWS Management Console
2009 New lower pricing tiers for Amazon CloudFront
2009 Amazon FPS
2009 Elastic MapReduce
May 2009 Elastic Load Balancing,
May 2009 Amazon Autoscaling
May 2009 Amazon CloudWatch
2009 AWS Virtual Private Clou
2009 New lower prices for Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances
2009 New lower prices for Windows instances with authentication services
2009 AWS enters the database market with Amazon Relational Database Service
2009 Lower Amazon EC2 on demand pricing
2009 EC2 Spot Instances
Dec 2009 AWS S3 Pricing reductions, Free Inbound Data Transfer until 6/30/2010
2009 Amazon CloudFront Streaming
2009 AWS US West Region
2010
2010 Lower Pricing for Outbound Data Transfer
2010 AWS launches first region in Asia Pacific (Singapore)
2010 Amazon SNS
May 2010 Multi Availability Zones for RDS
May 2010 Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage
2010 AWS Import/Export
2010 Amazon CloudFront adds HTTPS Support, lowers prices, Opens NYC edge location
2010 Cluster Compute Instances for EC2
2010 AWS Identity and Access Management
2010 Oracle certifies enterprise software on AWS
2010 New lower prices for High Memory Double and Quadruple XL instances\
2010 Read Replicas, Lower High Memory DB Memory Instance Prices for Amazon RDS
2010 Amazon S3 lowers storage prices
2010 Amazon Route 53
2010 Mobile SDKs for AWS
2011
2011 Amazon SES
2011 AWS New Premium Support Plans, Lowers usage prices by 50% on existing plans
2011 AWS Elastic Beanstalk
2011 AWS CloudFormation
2011 AWS Tokyo Region
May 2011 SAP certifies enterprise software on AWS
May 2011 Amazon CloudWatch custom metrics, lower prices for Amazon EC2 monitoring
2011 AWS new Data Transfer Pricing
Aug 2011 Amazon ElastiCache
Aug 2011 AWS enables enterprises to connect their data centers directly to AWS via AWS Direct Connect
Aug 2011 AWS launches Region dedicated to US Government Agencies and Contractors (AWS GovCloud)
2011 AWS Route53 lowers pricing for hosted zones
2011 AWS US West Region (Oregon) 100% Carbon Free Power
2011AWS enters South America with region in Sao Paulo, Brazil
2011 Amazon Elastic MapReduce support for cc2.8xlarge and reduced pricing for cc1.4xlarge
2012
2012 AWS Storage Gateway
2012 Dynamo DB
2012 Amazon SWF
2012 Amazon S3 lowers prices for standard storage
March 2012 New lower pricing for Amazon EC2, RDS and ElastiCache
April 2012 Amazon CloudSearch
2012AWS Marketplace for third-party selling of applications to businesses
2012 AWS Support Expands Free Tier, Adds Features, Lowers Prices
2012 AWS Sydney Region
July 2012 EC2 High I/O Instances
2012 Amazon Glacier
2012 EBS Provisioned IOPs Announced
2012 Second Gen Standard Instances for Amazon EC2 and a price reduction for M1 Instances
2012 More than 6K attend first AWS user conference, re:Invent
2012 AWS announces Amazon RedShift
2012 Amazon CloudSearch free trial program and price reduction
2012 Amazon RDS and Amazon ElastiCache Lower Prices
2012 Amazon S3 Lower prices for Standard Storage and RRS
2012 AWS Data Pipeline
2013
2013 Amazon Elastic Transcoder
2013 High Memory Cluster Instances
2013 EC2 Price Reduction, global expansion of M3 Standard Instances, reduced data transfer pricing
2013 AWS OpsWorks
2013 IBM protest reveals that AWS won $600M cloud contract with CIA
2013 Amazon RDS reduces price of Multi-AZ Deployments
2013 Amazon SQS and SNS lower prices and expand free tiers – 50% price drop for SQS
2013 AWS CloudHSM
2013 AWS introduces global developer training and certification program
2013 Lower prices on Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances, Amazon DB
2013 AWS lowers prices for Amazon S3 request pricing, Windows on-demand EC2 instances by up to 26%
May 2013 AWS first major cloud provider to gain FedRAMP certification
2013 AWS lowers prices of on-demand and reserved RDS instances by up to 28%
July 2013 AWS price reductions on EC2 dedicated instances
2013 AWS Gartner estimates that AWS customers are deploying 5x more infrastructure on AWS than the combined adoption of the next 14 providers
2013 Amazon AppStream launched
2013 Amazon WorkSpaces launched
2013 EC2 GPU Instances
2013 price reduction for M3 Instances
2013 – Amazon introduces Amazon Kinesis
2013 Amazon EC2 HI1 Instance price reduction and Spot availability
2013 Amazon China Region
2014
2014 New Amazon EC2 M3 Instance Sizes and Lower Prices for Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS
2014 AWS Storage Gateway price reduction
2014 Amazon Redshift new SSD-based node type
2014 General availability for Amazon AppStream and Amazon WorkSpaces
2014 AWS price reduction EC2, RDS, S3, ElastiCache, and Elastic MapReduce (price reduction #42)
2014 AWS receives Department of Defense-Wide provisional authorization for all U.S. Regions
2014 Availability of R3 instances
May 2014 Launch of AWS Management Portal for vCenter
May 2014 Introducing Amazon EBS encryption
2014 AWS availability of a new SSD-backed volume type for Amazon EBS (price drop #43)
2014 AWS Opened Pop-up Loft in San Francisco on temporary basis
2014 Amazon Redshift free trial and price reductions in Asia Pacific (price drop #44)
2014 new low-cost general purpose instance type for Amazon EC2
2014 Introduction of Amazon Zocalo (now known as Amazon WorkDocs)
2014 Route 53 price reduction (price drop #45)
2014 Introduction of services for mobile developers: Amazon Cognito, Amazon Mobile Analytics, AWS Mobile SDK, and Amazon SNS Mobile Push
2014 Launched Amazon CloudWatch logs
2014 AWS GovCloud achieves Department of Defense CSM Level 3-5 Provisional Authorization
2014 General availability of Zocalo (now known as Amazon WorkDocs)
2014 AWS EU (Frankfurt) region
2014 AWS Reopened Pop-up Loft in San Francisco on permanent basis
2014 Introduction of native support for document models like JSON into DynamoDB
2014 Introduction of AWS Directory Service
2014 AWS achieves ISO- 9001 certification
2014 Expansion of APN Partner benefits, introduction of new Managed Service and SaaS Partner Programs, and expansion of APN Partner training
2014 CloudSearch price drop (price drop #46)
2014 Introduction of Amazon Aurora, a MySQL-compatible database
2014 Enterprise security & governance services: Key Management, AWS Config, & AWS Service Catalog
2014 New application lifecycle management services introduced: AWS CodeDeploy & AWS CodePipeline
2014 Amazon EC2 Container Service introduced
2014 AWS Lambda announced
2014 Amazon EC2 C4 and EBS pre-announced
2014 AWS pledges long-term commitment to achieve 100 percent renewable-energy usage
2014 Data transfer and CloudFront price drop (price drop #47)
2015
2015 Amazon Wind Farm Fowler Ridge Announced
2015 Amazon WorkMail launches in preview
2015 Amazon Machine Learning, fully managed service announced
2015 AWS Marketplace for Desktop Apps and Amazon WorkSpaces Application Manager
2015 ISVs Go “All-In” with AWS announcement: MicroStrategy, Software AG, TIBCO, and Onshape
May 2015 AWS Educate to Accelerate Cloud Learning in the Classroom
2015 Amazon Solar Farm US East Announced
2015 M4 Instances for Amazon EC2
2015 AWS Opens Second Global “City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge”
2015 AWS 2016 India region pre-announced
2015 AWS Opened Pop-up Loft in New York City
2015 ISVs Go “All-In” with AWS announcement: Looker, Qlik, Sumo Logic, and Works Applications.
2015 AWS Announces Amazon API Gateway
2015 AWS Announces AWS Device Farm
2015 Amazon Wind Farm US East Announced
2015 Amazon Aurora General Availability
2015 AWS Announced Pop-up Lofts opening in London and Berlin
2015 AWS Announced Amazon QuickSight at re:Invent
2015 AWS Announced AWS Snowball and Amazon Kinesis Firehose at re:Invent
2015 AWS Announced AWS Database Migration Service and Amazon RDS for MariaDB at re:Invent
2015 AWS and Accenture Announce the Accenture AWS Business Group
2015 AWS Announced AWS IoT preview at re:Invent
2015 AWS Pre-Announced the AWS UK region to be third in the European Union
2015 Amazon Wind Farm US Central Announced
2015 AWS Announced IoT General Availability
2015 AWS Introduced t2.nano, the smallest and lowest cost Amazon Ec2 instance
2016
2016 AWS launched Korea region as fifth in Asia Pacific (Seoul)
2016 Amazon WorkMail General Availability
2015 AWS pre-announced Canada-Montreal region
2016 AWS Announced Amazon Lumberyard and Amazon GameLift Availability for Game Developers
2016 AWS Announced the AWS Pop-up Loft in Tel Aviv