The AWS Blog: The First Five Years

I was checking out the archive for this blog and realized that I wrote my first post exactly five years ago! In that time I've written posts to introduce each of our new services. Here's a quick recap of the highlights:

• We started out with the November 2004 introduction of the Amazon Simple Queue Service - When we rolled this out five years ago, I think the general reaction was "Huh? Why would Amazon do that?" I think it is now pretty obvious that a scalable messaging model is an essential component of a scalable system architecture.
• The next step was Amazon S3 in the spring of 2006. That service has grown and grown (and grown) and now holds a remarkable 82 billion objects. Our early adopters quickly realized that Amazon S3 was an efficient and reliable way to store any amount of data.
• In the summer of 2006 I took a break from my summer vacation to announce Amazon EC2 and with it the concept of computing in "the cloud." As we've added features such as the Elastic Block Store, Elastic IP Addresses, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon CloudWatch, and additional instance types, Amazon EC2 has become more flexible and more powerful, step by step.
• Amazon SimpleDB was announced at the end of 2007, giving developers a fast and highly scalable way to store and retrieve indexed data.
• We also introduced Amazon DevPay at the end of 2007, consistent with our plan to allow developers to build and to monetize their own web services. At the beginning of 2009 we also introduced the S3 Requester Pays model to make it easier to monetize content stored in Amazon S3.
• With increasing adoptions came increasing requests for more support options, so we introduced AWS Premium Support option in the spring of 2008, along with the Service Health Dashboard.
• We rolled out Amazon CloudFront in the fall of 2008, making it easier and more efficient to distribute content stored in Amazon S3.
• 2009 started off right, with the introduction of the AWS Management Console, making it even easier to manage the use of AWS resources.
• In the spring of 2009, Apache Hadoop became an official part of AWS with the introduction of Elastic MapReduce.If you read my 2006 post introducing EC2, you'll see that I thought that EC2 was a perfect host environment for Hadoop way back then!
• Come the summer of 2009, we introduced the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, giving our customers the ability to connect their existing networks up to an isolated set of AWS resources across a VPN connection.
• This past fall we continued to push forward, giving developers access to the Amazon Relational Database Service, making it easy for them to set up and run a relational database in the cloud.
•  Over the years we've also reduced our prices for bandwidth, Amazon EC2, and SQS requests. We also lowered prices and introduced a free tier of usage for Amazon SimpleDB.

We continue to listen to our customers and to innovate on their behalf. We've got plenty of work ahead of us, so stay tuned to this blog and keeps those cards and letters (and comments) coming!

-- Jeff;

Comments

[Robert Doyle]

Thanks Jeff and to all at Amazon for starting the ball rolling, changing on how the majority of us work.
AWS is a god send for small startups and has been a fantastic resource enabling us to deliver solutions that would be nigh on impossible without it.
Now call me greedy but keep the developments going hopefully including EC2 Windows 2008, Windows Reserved Instances, SimpleDB Delete, Update and more SQL like commands, HTTPS in CloudFront, Streaming built into CloudFront, Multiple Elastic IP per instance, DevPay available in Europe....

[Randy Hayes]

AWS Rules!

[Sam Pierson]

Thanks Jeff and Amazon. AWS continues to amaze and excite me. The future is here. Great job. Love it. Has opened up a world, just like Columbus.

[Isaac]

I'm somewhat surprised I don't see any mention of Mechanical Turk, which launched all the way back on November 2nd, 2005!

Was it not mentioned because it is still in Beta?