Particularly in light of AWS CEO Andy Jassy ascending to the top role at Amazon, there are suddenly a spate of articles talking about Amazon Web Services (or “AWS” as it’s commonly known). These tend to do a fair job when it comes to explaining what the hell AWS is, but they all miss the mark in one way or another.
Given that AWS was formerly relegated to mostly-technical realms, it’s starting to pop up in mainstream media. Whether it’s booting Parler off, losing a bid to serve the Pentagon, or embroiled in some open source licensing thing nobody understands, it’s getting increasingly hard to miss mentions of it.
This post is me doing my level best to explain AWS to folks who are fortunate enough to have jobs that don’t require working with esoteric cloud computing concepts.
This is in fact the same Amazon as Amazon.com. The company that started off as “we’re a bookstore” is nowadays “we are the freaking everything store” company based in Seattle.
Roughly 18 years ago (ish; this is ancient history in computing terms), Amazon had the revelation that if every product team spoke to one another via computer protocols instead of English, it would be a massive competitive advantage. In 2006, this idea was rolled out to customers in the first iteration of a series of “web services” that upended the entire game.
Before this existed, if you wanted to put up servers (big computers) on the internet to host a website, you had to either buy a bunch of actual computers from companies like Dell or HP or else rent them by the month from some other company. It was time-consuming and made getting a website up a fairly expensive, labor-intensive process. Servers cost thousands of dollars each, the racks to hold them and the connectivity to the internet cost thousands of dollars a month, and the only other alternatives were to rent these things from a variety of providers whose reliability was perceived to be fairly dicey. Before AWS came along, running your infrastructure for anything that was able to serve significant traffic could cost millions of dollars–upfront, in cash. Nowadays, it might still be a million dollars but it’s spread out over time as operating expenses, and you have much more control over influencing how much you spend.
AWS’s entire aim was to make the services that had previously only been available to large companies that had already made that investment available to basically anyone with a credit card. This started off with basic services such as “virtual computers,” “a storage service that would store data and return it on request,” and a couple of others that aren’t particularly germane to this explanation.
In time, these services multiplied to the roughly 200 that are available today in 2021, because they were transformative to AWS’s customers.
Roughly five years after AWS popped up, other companies caught on to what Amazon was doing and scrambled to do similar things themselves. But AWS had a massive head start.
Today, AWS is a behemoth. Netflix runs on top of it, as does Capital One, FINRA, DoorDash, and many more. When they went public, Lyft disclosed that they had committed at least $100 million a year in spend on AWS. Add them all together, and AWS currently brings in over $51 billion a year and climbing (year over year, AWS continues to be over 25% bigger!), while continuing to grow and grow.
No matter who you are, that’s serious money. But the same services that these companies are using are also available to anyone with a credit card.
