As Amazon Web Services ( AWS ) annualised revenue run rate hits US $ 71bn , Technology Magazine looks back on how this leviathan of the enterprise IT world was born and how it evolved .

Product launch

Infrastructure changes approved

Benjamin Black and Chris Pinkham write a short paper describing a vision for Amazon infrastructure that , in Black ' s words , " was completely standardised , completely automated , and relied extensively on web services for things like storage ." Jeff Bezos approved the idea of experimenting with Amazon ’ s infrastructure in 2004 , with the Amazon Web Services blog also launched the same year .

March the 14th of 2006 , AWS launched officially with the Simple Store Service . The Simple Queue Service would follow on July the 13th as the Infrastructure-as-a-service model began to take shape . The Elastic Compute Cloud ( EC2 ) — which would form a core part of the Amazon cloud platform — followed on August 25 , but the service is not available yet to the general public . In 2007 , Amazon EC2 was available in unlimited public beta , so that anybody can sign up and start using it .

Rivals set out their stalls

2008 brought the launch of the Google App Engine , a platform-as-a-service ( PaaS ) cloud computing platform for developing and hosting web applications , which signals the dawn of Google Cloud . The same year , Amazon launched a content delivery network , Amazon CloudFront . 2010 saw Microsoft enter the fray with the Azure platform , as Amazon announced that Amazon . com has migrated its retail services to AWS .

18 March 2022