How Amazon Web Services Reinvented the Internet and Became a Cash Cow
Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy explains how the business that allows everything from Slack to Netflix to function came to be
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a web platform that powers everything from Netflix to Slack to NASA. Launched in 2006, AWS is a suite of storage, database, and other services that allows anyone to build an internet application without ever purchasing physical hardware. (If you’ve ever heard about “cloud computing,” Amazon Web Services was one of its pioneers.) AWS has also turned into a cash machine for Amazon, generating billions in pure profit. AWS CEO Andy Jassy talked to Intelligencer about the early days of AWS, the debates and fears within Amazon about whether anyone would pay to use it, and why you should never be afraid of asking a dumb question.
We started to consider what became Amazon Web Services between 2000 and 2003. We were adding a lot of software development engineers, and yet software projects were taking just as much time as they had been before. Development teams had been telling the leadership that if they had more people they could deliver so much more quickly, but we weren’t seeing that actually play out.
