The story
Founding (2000–2005)
The genesis of AWS came in the early 2000s. 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 himself, Vermeulen, Jassy, Bezos, 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. They included Jeff Lawson, the Twilio CEO; Adam Selipsky, the Tableau CEO; and Mikhail Seregine, a co-founder at Outschool.
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 October 2004, Amazon released Alexa Web Information Service (AWIS) as beta. In November 2004, AWS launched its first infrastructure service, as beta: Simple Queue Service (SQS)., and officially launched in July 2006.
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S3, EC2, and other first-generation services (2006–2010)
On March 14, 2006, AWS launched Amazon S3 cloud storage, and that was the first AWS' IaaS that was generally available, followed by EC2 in August 2006. 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 and 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 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 later acquired in 2014. Ooyala, an online media company, was the eventual winner.
AWS offers, as of June 16, 2022, two block-storage options: the EC2 Instance Store and the Elastic Block Store (EBS). Some Amazon EBS features that help with data management, backups, and performance tuning include:
EBS volume tagging to allow the user to find and filter EBS resources on the Amazon Console and CLI.
Software-level RAID arrays to enable creation of groups of EBS volumes with high performance network throughput between them, using the standard RAID protocol.
Additional AWS services from this period include SimpleDB, Mechanical Turk, 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 October 2014, Amazon Aurora was launched.
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.
Since 2016
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 a unified autoscaling service on AWS. This new service unifies and builds on AWS existing, service-specific, scaling features like EC2 Auto Scaling groups, that was launched in August 2006.
In November 2018, AWS announced customized ARM cores for use in its servers. Also in November 2018, AWS announced AWS 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's primary cloud provider. Amazon has committed to investing up to $4 billion in Anthropic and will have a minority ownership position in the company. AWS also announced the GA of Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that makes foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies available through a single application programming interface (API).
In April 2024, AWS announced a new service called Deadline Cloud, which lets customers set up, deploy and scale up graphics and visual effects rendering pipelines on AWS cloud infrastructure.
In July 2024, AWS won a $1.3 billion (A$2 billion) contract with Australia's government to build a top-secret cloud service. The service included a partnership with the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD). The ASD director general Rachel Noble said the service would "provide a state-of-the-art collaborative space for our intelligence and defense community to store and access top-secret data”.
In December 2024, AWS announced Amazon Nova, its own family of foundation models. These models, offered through Amazon Bedrock, are designed for various tasks including content generation, video understanding, and building agentic applications. They are available in six different sizes. At the end of 2024, AWS announced Project Rainier, a massive one-of-a-kind machine "designed to usher in the next generation of AI."
In February 2026, India's National Informatics Centre (NIC), a department under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, announced deployment of AWS Outposts within its data centers as part of the government's Meghraj 2.0 hybrid cloud initiative, working with Indian data center provider Yotta Data Services. The deployment enables sensitive government workloads to remain within NIC's physical infrastructure while accessing AWS cloud services including Amazon EKS, Amazon RDS, and Amazon S3.
In March and April of 2026, during the 2026 Iran War, Iranian drone and missile strikes damaged AWS data centers in the United Arab Emirates (me-central-1) and Bahrain (me-south-1) regions, in the first deliberate military targeting of a commercial data center. Iran claimed the data centers hosted US military workloads. AWS advised customers to migrate to other regions.
On 30 June 2026, AWS Secret Cloud for Industry (ASCI) was made generally available. It holds a Provisional Authorization at Impact Level 6 from the Defense Information Systems Agency and uses the same Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) compliance framework that cleared defense contractors already use for on-premises classified systems. Northrop Grumman was the first defense contractor to deploy classified workloads on ASCI. To speed up the migration and to attract customers AWS launched ASCI Accelerator Initiative. The U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) launched IC Accelerated Modernization Framework (ICAMF) which subsidizes transfer to AWS from on-site systems. ASCI provides physically and logically isolated environment purpose-built to meet the most demanding security and compliance requirements. They also created AWS Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organization. It embeds AWS frontier teams—working with purpose-built agents—directly inside customer teams (business, engineering, and security teams) to build and deploy production AI systems with their data, governance, and processes.
Customer base
In October 2013, AWS was awarded a $600M contract with the CIA.
By 2019, it was reported that more than 80% of Germany's listed DAX companies used AWS. In August 2019, the U.S. Navy said it moved 72,000 users from six commands to an AWS cloud system as a first step toward pushing all of its data and analytics onto the cloud.
In January 2021, Amazon announced that it would suspend Parler from Amazon Web Services, stating Parler hosted “violent content” that violates its terms of service. Later in 2021, DISH Network announced it would develop and launch its 5G network on AWS. It was also reported that spy agencies and government departments in the UK, such as GCHQ, MI5, MI6, and the Ministry of Defence, contracted AWS to host their classified materials.
In 2022, Amazon shared a $9 billion contract from the United States Department of Defense for cloud computing with Google, Microsoft, and Oracle.
AWS won a $581 million contract from the U.S. Air Force in January 2026 to provide cloud services and specific Amazon data centers as part of the Cloud One Program, the Air Force's enterprise cloud environment.
Multiple financial services firms have shifted to AWS in some form. Notable customers include NASA and the Obama presidential campaign of 2012.
Significant service outages
On April 20, 2011, AWS suffered a major outage. Parts of the Elastic Block Store service became "stuck" and could not fulfill read/write requests. It took at least two days for the service to be fully restored.
On June 29, 2012, several websites that rely on Amazon Web Services were taken offline due to a severe storm in Northern Virginia, where AWS's largest data center cluster is located.
On October 22, 2012, a major outage occurred, affecting many sites including Reddit, Foursquare, and Pinterest. The cause was a memory leak bug in an operational data collection agent.
On December 24, 2012, AWS suffered another outage causing websites such as Netflix to be unavailable for customers in the Northeastern United States. AWS cited their Elastic Load Balancing service as the cause.
On February 28, 2017, AWS experienced a massive outage of S3 services in its Northern Virginia region. A majority of websites that relied on AWS S3 either hung or stalled, and Amazon reported within five hours that AWS was fully online again. No data has been reported to have been lost due to the outage. The outage was caused by a human error made while debugging, that resulted in removing more server capacity than intended, which caused a domino effect of outages.
On November 25, 2020, AWS experienced several hours of outage on the Kinesis service in North Virginia (US-East-1) region. Other services relying on Kinesis were also affected.
On December 7, 2021, an outage mainly affected the Eastern United States, disrupting delivery service and streaming.
On October 20, 2025, AWS suffered a major outage, resulting in platforms including Duolingo, Snapchat, Canva, Reddit, Canvas, Coinbase, Roblox, Fortnite, and Amazon being down.
From March 1, 2026, UAE and Bahrain regions are unavailable following attacks by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
From Wikipedia’s article on Amazon Web Services, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5