Product Case : Amazon Web Services

A Brief History of AWS

The origins of AWS as a developer tool can be traced all the way back to 2002, when an initial beta was released (named Amazon.com Web Service) that offered SOAP and XML interfaces for the Amazon product catalogue. This welcome mat for developers was the first step by Amazon to embracing the potential of developer-friendly tools, particularly in an infrastructure space, as an actual product.

Amazon.com’s Transformation Story

Prior experience with building Merchant.com, Amazon's e-commerce-as-a-service platform for third-party retailers to build their own web stores, led them to pursue service-oriented architecture as a means to scale their engineering operations led by the then CTO, Allan Vermeulen.

API to API Communication

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.

In July 2002, Amazon.com Web Services, launched its first web services opening up the Amazon.com platform to all developers. Over a 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."