Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments on a metered, pay-as-you-go basis, enabling customers to build and innovate without managing physical data centers.
Founding Story
AWS emerged from Amazon's internal struggles in the early 2000s. While building Merchant.com (an e-commerce platform for third-party retailers around 2000), Amazon realized its internal development environment was a jumbled mess. They untangled this into well-documented APIs, effectively becoming a services company. By 2003, during an executive retreat at Jeff Bezos' house, the team realized they were highly skilled at running reliable, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure. Chris Pinkham and Benjamin Black presented a paper suggesting selling access to virtual servers as a service. Jeff Bezos approved this vision to build an 'operating system for the internet' that would allow any developer or company to run applications on Amazon's infrastructure, democratizing access to powerful technology.
Discussions
No discussions yet
Be the first to start a discussion about Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Leadership
Founders
Andy Jassy
Former Chief of Staff to Jeff Bezos at Amazon; joined Amazon and mapped out the vision for AWS as an 'Internet Operating System'; assembled the founding team; served as AWS CEO from April 2016 to July 2021; currently President and CEO of Amazon.com; holds an MBA from Harvard Business School
Jeff Bezos
Founder of Amazon.com (1994); Executive Chair of Amazon; approved and supported the AWS infrastructure experimentation in 2004; led the 2003 executive retreat where AWS concept was formulated; graduated from Princeton University; also oversees Blue Origin and Washington Post
Executive Team
Matt Garman
CEO, Amazon Web Services
Joined AWS as intern in 2005, full-time in 2006 as first product manager; built and led Amazon EBS team; led hypervisor, storage, and sales teams; holds degrees in industrial engineering from Stanford University and MBA from Northwestern University; third CEO of AWS appointed June 2024
Andy Jassy
President and CEO, Amazon.com (Board Director)
Founded and led AWS from inception; served as AWS CEO from April 2016 to July 2021; former Chief of Staff to Jeff Bezos; Harvard MBA; became Amazon CEO in July 2021
Business Model
Revenue Model
Pay-as-you-go cloud computing services where customers pay only for individual services used for the duration they use them, with no long-term contracts or termination fees. Revenue generated through compute usage, storage, data transfer, database services, machine learning, analytics, and other cloud-based services.
Pricing Tiers
Default pricing model where customers pay only for resources consumed, billed per hour or per second depending on service
Flexible pricing model providing lower prices on Compute and Machine Learning in exchange for specific hourly dollar commitment; includes Database Savings Plans for AWS databases
Available for services like S3 and EC2 data transfer where cost per GB decreases as usage volume increases
Provides access to get started at no cost with limited usage of various AWS services
Custom discounts and benefits for customers who commit to certain usage levels across more than 200 services
Bundled services for single monthly price with no overage charges for specific service combinations
Target Markets
- Startups (over 330,000 active)
- Enterprise customers (Global Fortune 500 companies)
- Government and public sector (federal, state, local)
- Financial services (banking, capital markets, insurance, payments)
- Healthcare and life sciences
- Retail and consumer goods
- Scalable web application hosting
- E-commerce platform development
- Big data processing and analytics using Hadoop
- Real-time streaming data analytics
- Serverless application architecture
- Cloud-based data warehousing
- Netflix
- NASA
- CIA
- U.S. Department of Defense
History & Milestones
Matt Garman appointed as third CEO of AWS
AWS revenue reaches $107.6 billion with $39.8 billion operating income
AWS reaches 31% market share for cloud infrastructure; largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy
Andy Jassy becomes CEO of Amazon; Adam Selipsky returns as AWS CEO
AWS joins the MACH Alliance
5 AI Tools by Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Crowdsourcing marketplace providing access to a global, on-demand workforce for microtasks, data validation, and human intelligence tasks at scale.
AgentCore
8moBuild and deploy secure, production-grade AI agents using AWS Bedrock's managed orchestration framework.
Kiro
8moAmazon’s Claude-powered AI coding assistant for internal developers, optimized for enterprise safety and performance.
AWS generative AI assistant that helps understand, build, extend, and operate applications and workloads on AWS.
AWS Aurora
9moCloud-native relational database with AI-powered performance optimization and integration with Amazon Bedrock for generative AI applications.
