WE WORKED ON Amazon Web Services (AWS) behind the scenes for a long time, then finally launched it. AWS has become a very large company by reinventing the way companies buy computation. Traditionally, if you were a company and needed computation, you would build a data center, and you’d fill that data center with servers, and you’d have to upgrade the operating systems of those servers and keep everything running, and so on. None of that added any value to what the business was doing. It was kind of a price-of-admission, undifferentiated heavy lifting.
At Amazon we were doing just that: building data centers for ourselves. We saw it was a tremendous waste of effort between our applications engineers and our networking engineers, the ones who run the data centers, because they were having lots of meetings on all these non-value-added tasks. We said, “Look, what we can do is develop a set of hardened application program interfaces—APIs—that allow these two groups, the applications engineers and the networking engineers, to have roadmap meetings instead of these fine-grained meetings.” We wanted to build in a service-oriented architecture, where all of our services were available in hardened APIs that were well documented enough that anybody could use them.
As soon as we hatched that plan for ourselves, it became immediately obvious that every company in the world was going to want this. What really surprised us was that thousands of developers flocked to these APIs without much promotion or fanfare from Amazon. And then a business miracle that never happens happened—the greatest piece of business luck in the history of business, so far as I know. We faced no like-minded competition for seven years. It’s unbelievable. When I launched Amazon.com in 1995, Barnes & Noble then launched Barnesandnoble.com and entered the market two years later in 1997. Two years later is very typical if you invent something new. We launched Kindle; Barnes & Noble launched Nook two years later. We launched Echo; Google launched Google Home two years later. When you pioneer, if you’re lucky, you get a two-year head start. Nobody gets a seven-year head start, and so that was unbelievable. I think that the big, established enterprise software companies did not see Amazon as a credible enterprise software company, so we had this long runway to build this incredible, feature-rich product and service that is just so far ahead, and the team doesn’t let up. This team, led by Andy Jassy, is innovating on the product side so rapidly, and they’re running everything so well. I’m very proud of them.