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Re:AWS Drives More Than Half of Amazon's Operating Income by joncrane on Friday February 01, 2019 @07:59PM (#19060233)
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.

Re:AWS Drives More Than Half of Amazon's Operating Income by VectorLock on Friday February 01, 2019 @11:53PM (#19061169)
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

Re:AWS Drives More Than Half of Amazon's Operating Income by hooch on Saturday February 02, 2019 @02:55AM (#19061785)
I recall S3 being the first product announcement, with no real mention of what was yet to come.
Re:AWS Drives More Than Half of Amazon's Operating Income by jedberg on Saturday February 02, 2019 @03:37AM (#19061908)
SQS came before S3.