Happy 4th Birthday Amazon EC2

I almost missed a really important anniversary! Yesterday marked Amazon EC2's fourth birthday. Here are some of the ways that EC2 has grown and changed in the last four years:

Category	2006	2010
Regions	One	Four
Availability Zones	One	Ten Availability Zones
Instance Types	One	Nine
Pricing Models	One	Three
Storage	Ephemeral Storage	Ephemeral Storage Elastic Block Store
Operating Systems	Linux	Linux, Windows, OpenSolaris
Management Tools	Command-Line Tools	Command-Line Tools AWS Management Console Third-Party Tools
Ancillary Services	-	Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, CloudWatch
High Performance Computing	-	Elastic Map Reduce, Cluster Compute Instances

We've done quite a bit, but we're not resting, not for a minute. We have a lot of open positions on the AWS team, including a really interesting developer position within the EC2 team. This developer will focus on EC2's dynamic market pricing features. In addition to experience with Ruby, Perl, Java, C, or C++, candidates should have some experience building large-scale distributed systems and an interest in operational scheduling, optimization, and constraint satisfaction. You can read more here and you can send your resume directly to amazon-ec2-spot-jobs@amazon.com.

While I am on the subject of anniversaries, eight years ago this month I abandoned my full-time consulting practice to take a development position with the Amazon Associates Team, with the agreement that I could spend some of my time helping out with the effort to create and market the E-Commerce Service (which has since become the Product Advertising API). A few months in, I was asked if I would mind speaking at a conference. I guess I did ok, because they asked me to do another one, and before too long they invited me to apply for the position of Web Services Evangelist. I took on that title in the spring of 2003 and have been spreading the word about our web service efforts ever since. All things considered, this is a really awesome place to work. Day after day, week after week, things get more and more exciting around here. The pace is quick and I do my best to keep up. We do our best to understand and to meet the needs of our customers with regard to features, reliability, scale, business models, and price. I get to work with and to learn from a huge number of world-class intellects. If this sounds like the kind of place for you, check out our list of open jobs and apply today!

-- Jeff;

Comments

[Greg Moselle]

Happy Birthday from enStratus. It's a pleasure working with you!

[Greg]

Jeff, it's great to see what AWS did in those 4 years. But, if AWS is able to create such hi-tech solutions, requiring months of work, it's a shame they are still not able to deliver proper invoices for EU-based customers, which would take a few days to implement - and without this, AWS is loosing hundreds or thousands of potential customers in EU. It's unbelievable how they can be so blind. See http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=24824 - the thread was started 2 years ago...

[Bratticus]

Shame that they wasted their time supporting OpenSolaris since it's officially dead now. They could have supported OpenBSD or FreeBSD instead.

[Oxzen Web Development]

AWS has been a great service. Has been great for us and our customers. Agree with the above comment but AWS is improving and has improved dramatically since starting 4 years ago.