Amazon Web Services

Overview

The world’s dominant cloud platform began as a memo — and was built in a city 10,000 miles from Seattle. ZDNet In 2003, Amazon infrastructure engineer Chris Pinkham started trying to build an “infrastructure service for the world,” and the service that became the cornerstone of modern cloud computing, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), was developed largely by a small team at Amazon’s first satellite development office in Cape Town, South Africa. ZDNet Amazon Web Services, a division of Amazon, launched formally in spring 2006 with its Simple Storage Service (S3), followed months later by EC2. AWS Two decades later it is a $128.7-billion-a-year business — the unit that, by early 2024, was generating more than 60% of Amazon’s total operating income. SEC GeekWire

The Cape Town origin of EC2

Pinkham’s motivation was the cost of Amazon’s own infrastructure work: maintaining reliable, scalable systems in a traditional multi-datacenter model could consume as much as 70% of engineering time and effort. ZDNet Werner Vogels, Amazon’s chief technology officer, put the goal in stark terms: the thinking was to deliver services that could cut that cost to 30% or less — and experience later showed it could go much lower. ZDNet He and fellow engineer Benjamin Black wrote a short paper outlining the idea for Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, who liked it and asked for more detail on a virtual, cloud-provisionable server. ZDNet But Pinkham had a baby on the way, and after talking with others at Amazon he set up a satellite development office in South Africa — the company’s first in the region — where he and engineers including Christopher Brown and Wiljem Van Biljon designed the EC2 service. ZDNet By 2005 EC2 was in a beta under non-disclosure, and it launched officially in summer 2006. ZDNet

At a 2006 talk at MIT, Bezos described S3, EC2 and Mechanical Turk as the product of “11 years of web-scale computing” and “multiple billions” of dollars of investment; then-CFO Tom Szkutak called the strategy “exposing the guts of Amazon.” ZDNet The phrase stuck because it was accurate: Amazon was commercializing the plumbing it had built for itself. Pinkham later left Amazon to co-found the cloud company Nimbula, but the Cape Town office — a continent away from Seattle, born partly of one engineer’s wish to go home — remained the literal birthplace of EC2. ZDNet

AWS frames its own founding mission in a single line: launching in spring 2006 “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.” AWS That democratization pitch proved to be the pitch that built the cloud industry: S3 solved bulk data storage first, and EC2 gave customers computing power “with practically the click of a button.” AWS

From Jassy to Selipsky to Garman — and $128.7 billion

The division was led from its inception by Andy Jassy, who ran AWS through the early 2000s until he was named Amazon’s CEO in 2021. GeekWire Jassy’s successor was Adam Selipsky, who had left Amazon to lead Tableau and returned in March 2021 to take the cloud job. GeekWire His tenure was defined by the back half of the pandemic and the rise of generative AI, which fueled demand for cloud services while putting AWS in the unusual position of scrambling to catch up with rivals Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. GeekWire

In May 2024, Amazon announced Selipsky would step down, in a memo from Jassy that described the departure as part of an informal plan the two had agreed to when Selipsky returned — that he would likely serve “a few years” while helping prepare the next generation of leadership. GeekWire Selipsky, in his own memo, said he was leaving with “truly mixed emotions” and wanted time with family, to recharge, and to reflect. GeekWire Matt Garman — the AWS senior vice president of sales and marketing and an 18-year company veteran — took over as CEO effective June 3, 2024. GeekWire At the time, AWS had reached a $100 billion annual revenue run rate and held about 31% of the cloud market, according to Synergy Research Group. GeekWire

In Amazon’s fiscal 2025 10-K, the AWS segment reported net sales of $128.725 billion, up 20% from $107.556 billion in 2024 — confirming the cloud division as one of the largest enterprise-technology businesses on earth. SEC

What this profile does not claim

It does not claim AWS was the first cloud provider in any absolute sense, nor does it repeat the popular myth that AWS began as a pure “excess capacity” side project — ZDNet’s history centers the deliberate 2003 memo and Bezos’s direct green light instead. ZDNet It does not assert current market-share figures beyond the 2024 Synergy estimate cited by GeekWire, and it does not present AWS operating-income figures, which were not confirmed from the 10-K extraction used here. SEC