This is a timeline of Amazon Web Services, which offers a suite of cloud computing services that make up an on-demand computing platform.
Background and development Year Month and date (if available) Event type Details 2000 Prelude Amazon.com, the parent company of the as yet nonexistent Amazon Web Services (AWS), begins work on merchant.com, an e-commerce platform intended for use by other large retailers such as Target Corporation. In the process, Amazon's team realizes that they need to decouple their code better, with cleaner interfaces and access APIs. Around the same time, the company also realizes the need to build infrastructure as a service internally, to improve the speed of development and not have it bottlenecked by infrastructure availability. All these changes help pave the way for AWS. 2003 Prelude Benjamin Black and Chris Pinkham write a short paper describing a vision for Amazon infrastructure that, in Black's words, "was completely standardized, completely automated, and relied extensively on web services for things like storage." 2004 Prelude Jeff Bezos approves the idea of experimenting with Amazon infrastructure. Pinkham leaves for South Africa to set up a satellite development office. While there, he works on a pilot along with help from Chris Brown and Willem van Biljon. Although the team works from South Africa, the servers are hosted in the United States. 2004 November 9 Customer outreach The Amazon Web Services blog is launched, with a first blog post by Jeff Barr. At the time, the name Amazon Web Services refers to a collection of APIs and tools to access the Amazon.com catalog, rather than the infrastructure as a service it would eventually become. 2005 Prelude A private precursor to AWS launches, with a small number of customers. At the same time, Amazon begins planning for a public launch of AWS. Based on internal discussions, they decide to launch storage, compute, and database offerings so that developers can use all of them together.
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