Earlier days of Amazon Web Services (2000–2005)
The genesis of AWS was when in the early 2000s, experience with building Merchant.com, Amazon’s e-commerce-as-a-service platform for third-party retailers to build their own web-stores, made them pursue service-oriented architecture as a means to scale their engineering operations.
Around the same timeframe, Amazon sought to create a shared IT platform and so its engineering organizations which were spending 70% of their time on “undifferentiated heavy-lifting” such as IT and infrastructure problems could focus on customer-facing innovation instead.
S3, EC2 and other first generation services (2006–2010)
On March 14 2006, Amazon S3 cloud storage launched followed by EC2 in August 2006. Andy Jassy, AWS founder and vice president in 2006, said at the time that Amazon S3 (one of the first and most scalable elements of AWS) “helps free developers from worrying about where they are going to store data, whether it will be safe and secure, if it will be available when they need it, the costs associated with server maintenance, or whether they have enough storage available. Amazon S3 enables developers to focus on innovating with data, rather than figuring out how to store it. Pi Corporation, a start-up Paul Maritz co-founded, was the first beta-user of EC2 outside of Amazon, whilst Microsoft was among EC2’s first enterprise customers. Later that year, SmugMug, one of the early AWS adopters, attributed savings of around US$400,000 in storage costs to S3.
AWS went on to become a market leader in the own industry which it started and the rest is history.
Significant service outages:
- On April 20, 2011, AWS suffered a major outage. Parts of the Elastic Block Store (EBS) service became “stuck” and could not fulfill read/write requests. It took at least two days for service to be fully restored.
- On June 29, 2012, several websites that rely on Amazon Web Services were taken offline due to a severe storm in Northern Virginia, where AWS’ largest data center cluster is located.
- On December 24, 2012, AWS suffered another outage causing websites such as Netflix to be unavailable for customers in the Northeastern United States. AWS cited their Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) service as the cause.
- On February 28, 2017, AWS experienced a massive outage of S3 services in its Northern Virginia region. A majority of websites which relied on AWS S3 either hung or stalled, and Amazon reported within five hours that AWS was fully online again. No data has been reported to have been lost due to the outage. The outage was caused by a human error made while debugging, that resulted in removing more server capacity than intended, which caused a domino effect of outages.
- On November 25, 2020, AWS experienced several hours of outage on the Kinesis service in North Virginia (us-east-1) region. Other services relying on Kinesis were also impacted.
Read more about AWS and it’s origin here…
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Cheers,
Yogendra
