AWS

At the turn of the 2000s, Amazon — founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 as an online bookseller — had become a large-scale commerce platform whose very heterogeneous internal architecture was slowing development. From 2002 onwards, under the leadership of Andy Jassy and with the support of engineers such as Adam Selipsky, the company began a structural overhaul: every internal service had to expose its features as independent network APIs. Bezos issued in 2002 his famous "API Mandate" imposing this discipline on all teams. The goal was initially operational, but the executives quickly saw the possibility of billing these capabilities to third parties: so was born the idea of Amazon Web Services. The first public services were launched as early as 2004 (SQS), but it was on 14 March 2006 that Simple Storage Service (S3) appeared, followed on 25 August 2006 by Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The pay-as-you-go billing model — you pay for what you consume, per gigabyte or per virtual-machine hour — was a radical novelty that removed upfront hardware investments. AWS made it possible for small start-ups such as Airbnb or Dropbox to operate at a global scale without any data centre of their own. The ecosystem quickly expanded: RDS (2009) for relational databases, Lambda (2014) for serverless computing, SageMaker (2017) for machine learning, specialised services for video, IoT and security. In 2024, AWS operates around thirty regions worldwide, employs tens of thousands of engineers and accounts for about one third of the global public cloud market, ahead of Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Andy Jassy, who had led it from the start, took over as CEO of Amazon in 2021 when Bezos stepped down; Adam Selipsky, having returned from Tableau, led AWS until 2024. By turning computing into an on-demand public utility, AWS redefined the software economy and made viable the explosion of mobile applications, social platforms, generative AI and post-2010 start-ups. Together with the iPhone and Android, it constitutes one of the three foundational infrastructures of the mobile-cloud era.