Timeline How AWS became the largest cloud computing provider on the planet

TIMELINE

HOW AWS BECAME THE LARGEST CLOUD COMPUTING PROVIDER ON THE PLANET

As Amazon Web Services (AWS) annualised revenue run rate hits US$71bn, Technology Magazine looks back on how this leviathan of the enterprise IT world was born and how it evolved.

2003

Infrastructure changes approved

Benjamin Black and Chris Pinkham write a short paper describing a vision for Amazon infrastructure that, in Black's words, "was completely standardised, completely automated, and relied extensively on web services for things like storage." Jeff Bezos approved the idea of experimenting with Amazon’s infrastructure in 2004, with the Amazon Web Services blog also launched the same year.

2006

Product launch

March the 14th of 2006, AWS launched officially with the Simple Store Service. The Simple Queue Service would follow on July the 13th as the Infrastructure-as-a-service model began to take shape. The Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) — which would form a core part of the Amazon cloud platform — followed on August 25, but the service is not available yet to the general public. In 2007, Amazon EC2 was available in unlimited public beta, so that anybody can sign up and start using it.

2008

Rivals set out their stalls

2008 brought the launch of the Google App Engine, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud computing platform for developing and hosting web applications, which signals the dawn of Google Cloud. The same year, Amazon launched a content delivery network, Amazon CloudFront. 2010 saw Microsoft enter the fray with the Azure platform, as Amazon announced that Amazon.com has migrated its retail services to AWS.

2012

Changing the ecosystem

AWS Marketplace launched in 2012 as a place for customers to find, buy, and quickly deploy software that runs on AWS. An early harbinger of ‘serverless architecture’ was seen with AWS Lambda in 2014, known as Functionsas-a-Service. 2015 saw Garnet place AWS at the top of it’s Magic Quadrant as Infrastructure as a Service ‘Leaders’.

2021

Market leaders

According to Statista, in the third quarter of 2021, the most popular vendor in the cloud infrastructure services market was AWS with 32% of the entire market. Microsoft Azure took second place with 21% market share, followed by Google Cloud with 8% market share.