How the World Got Wired

Chapter 18 — The Cloud

Look around the room you are sitting in. Find your phone. Find any other screens. Find your family’s computer if there is one.

Almost nothing you do on any of those screens is actually stored on them.

When you take a photo on your phone, your phone keeps a copy — but it also sends a copy, automatically, to some company’s giant computer thousands of miles away. When you message a friend, the message doesn’t really travel directly from your phone to theirs. It travels to a company’s computer first, gets copied, and gets forwarded. When you watch a video, the video doesn’t live on your device. It lives, somewhere, in an enormous building full of computers, owned by a company you don’t work for.

Where, exactly, are all those copies?

For a surprisingly large fraction of the digital world, the answer is the same. They are sitting on computers owned by a single American company, in a small set of giant warehouses scattered across the planet.

The company is called Amazon. The business is called Amazon Web Services — almost everyone calls it AWS for short. And almost nobody outside the technology industry talks about it, even though it has become — quietly, without television commercials, without consumer products — one of the most important businesses in the modern world.

This chapter is about how that happened.

The Accident

The story of AWS is, like most of the stories in this book, not the story the company tells about itself in its marketing.

In the early 2000s, after almost going bankrupt the way you read about in Chapter 13, Amazon was trying to grow back into a healthy company. As it grew, its computer systems were getting tangled up. Different teams inside Amazon were building software in different ways. When one team needed to share information with another team, it was often easier to rebuild the wheel than to figure out the other team’s mess.

In 2002, Jeff Bezos issued a memo to all the engineers at Amazon. The memo is famous now, even though it was only ever shared internally. It said, roughly: from now on, every team inside Amazon must build its software so that other teams can use it through a clean, well-documented interface. No more secret internal hacks. No more “well, our system only works if you ask us nicely.” Every piece of Amazon’s software had to be built as if some unknown stranger, out in the world, might one day want to use it.

The memo ended with one of the great Bezos lines, which I will paraphrase, because the exact wording was rude: if you don’t do this, you’ll be fired.

The engineers grumbled. They did it anyway. Over the next few years, Amazon’s tangled internal systems were rebuilt as a collection of clean, separate services that any other piece of software could talk to through clearly-defined channels.

Then — and this is the accidental part — someone at Amazon noticed that they had, almost by mistake, built something other people would want to pay for.

If Amazon’s internal teams could rent storage and computing power from other internal teams, by sending clean requests through clean interfaces, then anyone could do the same thing. A startup in San Francisco. A research lab in Norway. A teenager in his bedroom. They could all, in theory, just plug into Amazon’s systems, rent however much computing power they needed, pay only for what they used, and never have to buy a single server of their own.

In March of 2006, Amazon launched a service called S3, for Simple Storage Service. S3 let anyone, anywhere in the world, store any amount of data in Amazon’s warehouses, and pay only by the gigabyte. A few months later, in August of 2006, Amazon launched a service called EC2, for Elastic Compute Cloud. EC2 let anyone rent an entire virtual computer — fully configured, with a chosen operating system, ready to run any software — for as little as ten cents per hour.

Almost nobody noticed at first. The technology press, in 2006, was focused on social networks and smartphones. The launch of EC2 got coverage in industry trade publications, but it wasn’t a front-page story anywhere.

It would, however, change almost everything about how technology companies got built.

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