Amazon Web Services

The first of the public cloud providers we are going to be looking at in this chapter is AWS. It was first launched in July 2002 as an internal service used within Amazon to provide a few disparate services to support the Amazon retail site. A year or so later, an internal presentation at Amazon laid the groundwork for what AWS was to become: a standardized and completely automated compute infrastructure to support Amazon's vision of a web-based retail platform.

At the end of the presentation, it was mentioned that Amazon could possibly sell access to some of the services AWS had to offer to help fund the infrastructure investment required to get the platform off the ground. In late 2004, the first of these public services was launched – Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), a distributed message queuing service. Around this time, Amazon started work on services that it could consume for the retail site and services it could sell to the public...