Amazon Web Services (AWS) Loft - NYC (48129118457).jpg

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered, pay-as-you-go basis. Clients will often use this in combination with autoscaling (a process that allows a client to use more computing in times of high application usage, and then scale down to reduce costs when there is less traffic). These cloud computing web services provide various services related to networking, compute, storage, middleware, IoT and other processing capacity, as well as software tools via AWS server farms. This frees clients from managing, scaling, and patching hardware and operating systems.
One of the foundational services is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which allows users to have at their disposal a virtual cluster of computers, with extremely high availability, which can be interacted with over the internet via REST APIs, a CLI or the AWS console. AWS's virtual computers emulate most of the attributes of a real computer, including hardware central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) for processing; local/RAM memory; Hard-disk(HDD)/ SSD storage; a choice of operating systems; networking; and pre-loaded application software such as web servers, databases, and customer relationship management (CRM).

AWS services are delivered to customers via a network of AWS server farms located throughout the world. Fees are based on a combination of usage (known as a "Pay-as-you-go" model), hardware, operating system, software, or networking features chosen by the subscriber require availability, redundancy, security, and service options. Subscribers can pay for a single virtual AWS computer, a dedicated physical computer, or clusters of either. Amazon provides select portions of security for subscribers (e.g. physical security of the data centers) while other aspects of security are the responsibility of the subscriber (e.g. account management, vulnerability scanning, patching). AWS operates from many global geographical regions including seven in North America.

Amazon markets AWS to subscribers as a way of obtaining large-scale computing capacity more quickly and cheaply than building an actual physical server farm. All services are billed based on usage, but each service measures usage in varying ways. As of 2021 Q4, AWS has 33% market share for cloud infrastructure while the next two competitors Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have 21%, and 10% respectively, according to Synergy Group.

Services

AWS comprises over 200 products and services including computing, storage, networking, database, analytics, application services, deployment, management, machine learning, mobile, developer tools, RobOps and tools for the Internet of Things. The most popular include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Connect, and AWS Lambda (a serverless function that can perform arbitrary code written in any language that can be configured to be triggered by hundreds of events, including http calls).

Services expose functionality through APIs for clients to use in their applications. These APIs are accessed over HTTP, using the REST architectural style and SOAP protocol for older APIs and exclusively JSON for newer ones. Clients can interact with these APIs in various ways, including from the AWS console (a website), by using SDKs written in various languages (such as Python, Java, and JavaScript), or by making direct REST calls.

History

Founding (2000–2005)

The genesis of AWS came in the early . After building ''Merchant.com'', Amazon's e-commerce-as-a-service platform that offers third-party retailers a way to build their own web-stores, Amazon pursued service-oriented architecture as a means to scale its engineering operations, led by then CTO Allan Vermeulen.

Around the same time frame, Amazon was frustrated with the speed of its software engineering, and sought to implement various recommendations put forth by Matt Round, an engineering leader at the time, including maximization of autonomy for engineering teams, adoption of REST, standardization of infrastructure, removal of gate-keeping decision-makers (bureaucracy), and continuous deployment. He also called for increasing the percentage of the time engineers spent building the software rather than doing other tasks. Amazon created "a shared IT platform" so its engineering organizations, which were spending 70% of their time on "undifferentiated heavy-lifting" such as IT and infrastructure problems, could focus on customer-facing innovation instead. Besides, in dealing with unusual peak traffic patterns, especially during the holiday season, by migrating services to commodity Linux hardware and relying on open source software, Amazon's Infrastructure team, led by Tom Killalea, Amazon's first CISO, had already run its data centers and associated services in a "fast, reliable, cheap" way.

In July 2002 Amazon.com Web Services, managed by Colin Bryar, launched its first web services, opening up the Amazon.com platform to all developers. Over one hundred applications were built on top of it by 2004. This unexpected developer interest took Amazon by surprise and convinced them that developers were "hungry for more".

By the summer of 2003, Andy Jassy had taken over Bryar's portfolio at Rick Dalzell's behest, after Vermeulen, who was Bezos' first pick, declined the offer. Jassy subsequently mapped out the vision for an "Internet OS" made up of foundational infrastructure primitives that alleviated key impediments to shipping software applications faster. By fall 2003, databases, storage, and compute were identified as the first set of infrastructure pieces that Amazon should launch.

Jeff Barr, an early AWS employee, credits Vermeulen, Jassy, Bezos himself, and a few others for coming up with the idea that would evolve into EC2, S3, and RDS; Jassy recalls the idea was the result of brainstorming 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 and the most primitive building blocks required to build them. Werner Vogels cites Amazon's desire to make the process of "invent, launch, reinvent, relaunch, start over, rinse, repeat" as fast as it could was leading them to break down organizational structures with "two-pizza teams" and application structures with distributed systems; and that these changes ultimately paved way for the formation of AWS and its mission "to expose all of the atomic-level pieces of the Amazon.com platform". According to Brewster Kahle, co-founder of Alexa Internet, which was acquired by Amazon in 1999, his start-up's compute infrastructure helped Amazon solve its big data problems and later informed the innovations that underpinned AWS.

Jassy assembled a founding team of 57 employees from a mix of engineering and business backgrounds to kick-start these initiatives, with a majority of the hires coming from outside the company; Jeff Lawson, Twilio CEO, Adam Selipsky, Tableau CEO, and Mikhail Seregine, co-founder at Outschool among them.

In late 2003, the concept for compute, which would later launch as EC2, was reformulated when Chris Pinkham and Benjamin Black presented a paper internally describing a vision for Amazon's retail computing infrastructure that was completely standardized, completely automated, and would rely extensively on web services for services such as storage and would draw on internal work already underway. Near the end of their paper, they mentioned the possibility of selling access to virtual servers as a service, proposing the company could generate revenue from the new infrastructure investment. Thereafter Pinkham, Willem van Biljon, and lead developer Christopher Brown developed the Amazon EC2 service, with a team in Cape Town, South Africa.

In November 2004, AWS launched its first infrastructure service for public usage: Simple Queue Service (SQS).

S3, EC2, and other first generation services (2006–2010)

On March 14, 2006, AWS launched Amazon S3 cloud storage followed by EC2 in August 2006. Andy Jassy, AWS founder and vice president in 2006, said at the time that Amazon S3 "helps free developers from worrying about where they are going to store data, whether it will be safe and secure, if it will be available when they need it, the costs associated with server maintenance, or whether they have enough storage available. Amazon S3 enables developers to focus on innovating with data, rather than figuring out how to store it." Pi Corporation, a startup Paul Maritz co-founded, was the first beta-user of EC2 outside of Amazon, while Microsoft was among EC2's first enterprise customers. Later that year, SmugMug, one of the early AWS adopters, attributed savings of around US$400,000 in storage costs to S3. According to Vogels, S3 was built with 8 microservices when it launched in 2006, but had over 300 microservices by 2022.

In September 2007, AWS announced its annual ''Start-up Challenge'', a contest with prizes worth $100,000 for entrepreneurs and software developers based in the US using AWS services such as S3 and EC2 to build their businesses. The first edition saw participation from Justin.tv, which Amazon would later acquire in 2014. Ooyala, an online media company, was the eventual winner.

Additional AWS services from this period include SimpleDB, Mechanical Turk, Elastic Block Store, Elastic Beanstalk, Relational Database Service, DynamoDB, CloudWatch, Simple Workflow, CloudFront, and Availability Zones.

Growth (2010–2015)

In November 2010, it was reported that all of Amazon.com's retail sites had migrated to AWS. Prior to 2012, AWS was considered a part of Amazon.com and so its revenue was not delineated in Amazon financial statements. In that year industry watchers for the first time estimated AWS revenue to be over $1.5 billion.

On November 27, 2012, AWS hosted its first major annual conference, ''re:Invent'' with a focus on AWS's partners and ecosystem, with over 150 sessions. The three-day event was held in Las Vegas because of its relatively cheaper connectivity with locations across the United States and the rest of the world. Andy Jassy and Werner Vogels presented keynotes, with Jeff Bezos joining Vogels for a fireside chat. AWS opened early registrations at US$1,099 per head for their customers from over 190 countries. On stage with Andy Jassy at the event which saw around 6000 attendees, Reed Hastings, CEO at Netflix, announced plans to migrate 100% of Netflix's infrastructure to AWS.

To support industry-wide training and skills standardization, AWS began offering a certification program for computer engineers, on April 30, 2013, to highlight expertise in cloud computing. Later that year, in October, AWS launched ''Activate'', a program for start-ups worldwide to leverage AWS credits, third-party integrations, and free access to AWS experts to help build their business.

In 2014, AWS launched its partner network, AWS Partner Network (APN), which is focused on helping AWS-based companies grow and scale the success of their business with close collaboration and best practices.

In January 2015, Amazon Web Services acquired Annapurna Labs, an Israel-based microelectronics company for a reported US$350–370M.

In April 2015, Amazon.com reported AWS was profitable, with sales of $1.57 billion in the first quarter of the year and $265 million of operating income. Founder Jeff Bezos described it as a fast-growing $5 billion business; analysts described it as "surprisingly more profitable than forecast". In October, Amazon.com said in its Q3 earnings report that AWS's operating income was $521 million, with operating margins at 25 percent. AWS's 2015 Q3 revenue was $2.1 billion, a 78% increase from 2014's Q3 revenue of $1.17 billion. 2015 Q4 revenue for the AWS segment increased 69.5% y/y to $2.4 billion with a 28.5% operating margin, giving AWS a $9.6 billion run rate. In 2015, Gartner estimated that AWS customers are deploying 10x more infrastructure on AWS than the combined adoption of the next 14 providers.

Current era (2016–present)

In 2016 Q1, revenue was $2.57 billion with net income of $604 million, a 64% increase over 2015 Q1 that resulted in AWS being more profitable than Amazon's North American retail business for the first time. Jassy was thereafter promoted to CEO of the division. Around the same time, Amazon experienced a 42% rise in stock value as a result of increased earnings, of which AWS contributed 56% to corporate profits.

AWS had $17.46 billion in annual revenue in 2017. By the end of 2020, the number had grown to $46 billion. Reflecting the success of AWS, Jassy's annual compensation in 2017 hit nearly $36 million.

In January 2018, Amazon launched an autoscaling service on AWS.

In November 2018, AWS announced customized ARM cores for use in its servers. Also in November 2018, AWS is developing ground stations to communicate with customers' satellites.

In 2019, AWS reported 37% yearly growth and accounted for 12% of Amazon's revenue (up from 11% in 2018).

In April 2021, AWS reported 32% yearly growth and accounted for 32% of $41.8 billion cloud market in Q1 2021.

In January 2022, AWS joined the MACH Alliance, a non-profit enterprise technology advocacy group.

In June 2022, it was reported that in 2019 Capital One had not secured their AWS resources properly, and was subject to a data breach by a former AWS employee. The employee was convicted of hacking into the company's cloud servers to steal customer data and use computer power to mine cryptocurrency. The ex-employee was able to download the personal information of more than 100 million Capital One customers.

In June 2022, AWS announced they had launched the AWS Snowcone, a small computing device, to the International Space Station on the Axiom Mission 1.

In September 2023, AWS announced it would become AI startup Anthropic

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