This is a myth, and it needs to die. AWS was not designed for amazon's infrastructure, nor was it spare capacity of said infrastructure at any point. It was built from the ground up to be an independent service selling to third parties, on independent servers in independent data centers.

It took many years for amazon.com retail stuff to migrate to it, and supposedly some parts still aren't migrated.

I mean, I'm gullible so I believe you, but I also believe Steve Yegge who wrote about this:

> Well, the first big thing Bezos realized is that the infrastructure they'd built for selling and shipping books and sundry could be transformed an excellent repurposable computing platform. So now they have the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and the Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and the Amazon Relational Database Service, and a whole passel' o' other services browsable at aws.amazon.com. These services host the backends for some pretty successful companies, reddit being my personal favorite of the bunch.

https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

(posted in 2011, and he claims he left amazon 6½y before that)

You sound confident so I'm sure there's something to it. But on the other hand, there's loads more, similar comments in that memo.

And Steve, well, Steve is known to be quite the iconoclast. I never took him to suffer fools gladly.

Both of you can be right. It's possible that Bezos saw the opportunity in taking advantage of their tech infra expertise and building that into a public product, but maybe it wasn't just taking what they already built and making it public.

I don't personally know but https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/cloud-computing... makes some strong claims otherwise.

And if AWS were just Amazon's spare capacity, who would bet on their stuff staying up through cyber monday or prime day?

Nobody is claiming that it's still just spare capacity, just that it started as that.

I love this:

    "Bezos is super smart; don't get me wrong.

    He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies."

Andy Jesse wrote the original business plan for AWS. He says something different.

https://readwrite.com/2012/04/26/popping-the-amazon-web-serv...

Is there a source for this? I'm genuinely curious. The "AWS started as Amazon's extra capacity" is such a compelling story.

It wasn't extra capacity so much as making some of the internal tools publicly available, and it took off.

I believe SQS was the first publicly available service. EC2 was obviously the tipping point and that was a couple of years later.

The story I always heard was they had a ton of extra capacity that was very seasonal and then someone came up with the great idea to sell that extra capacity in the off season.

SQS as the first publicly available service sounds weird to me but I don't have any sources to cite otherwise.

Edit: Wikipedia says SQS was the first service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services#History

I recall S3 being the first product announcement, with no real mention of what was yet to come.

SQS came before S3.

Part of that success was a mandate back in the earlier days of the company that all development and systems administration assets be designed with the presumption that they may be converted into a customer accessible frameworks one day.

I've never heard this before, it's an interesting anecdote, do you have a source?