Our Origins
Overview
In the early days of operating Amazon.com, we experienced first-hand how hard and expensive it was to provision and manage IT infrastructure, and we saw how this distracted talented teams from innovating. That’s why we launched Amazon Web Services in the spring of 2006, to rethink IT infrastructure completely so that anyone—even a kid in a college dorm room—could access the same powerful technology as the world’s largest and most sophisticated companies. Since those early days, we’ve never stopped inventing on behalf of our customers—from storage to compute, databases to custom silicon, and advanced generative AI services.
A breakthrough in IT infrastructure
With the launch of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) in 2006, AWS solved a major problem: how to store data while keeping it highly secure and maintaining privacy and control. A few months later, the launch of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) gave customers instant access to computer processing power. It was a service that would help ensure that anything customers could have done with a massive data center could be done remotely with practically the click of a button. These initial AWS offerings marked the beginning of our commitment to democratizing access to technology, a commitment that continues today as we remove barrier after barrier, freeing our customers to invent and build whatever they can imagine. Find out who were some of the first customers to use Amazon S3 »
Find out more about the origins of AWS
10 things you need to know about AWS CEO Matt Garman
Matt Garman, the first AWS product manager, helped build and launch a slew of core services. He understands what it means to listen to customers and stresses that security will always be the company’s number one priority.
Firing up cloud machines like ‘elves on roller skates’
There is a saying among South Africans: A farmer makes a plan. "It's an expression everybody knows and kind of lives by," said James Greenfield, VP of software engineering at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Cape Town, South Africa. It's also one reason South Africa was the perfect place to change computing forever.