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Comment by jakozaur | Hacker News Reader

Would add two points:

1. Internal Jeff Bezos memo from around 2002 that everything should be a web service, which eventually can be externalize: http://apievangelist.com/2012/01/12/the-secret-to-amazons-su...

"Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired. Thank you; have a nice day!"

2. AWS started in 2006 with EC2 (provision service through API) and S3 (some file storage). Simple, but primitive building blocks.

Google entered game early in 2008 with App Engine. Very powerful, but restricted Platform as a Service. It pretty much requires to rewrite whole application from scratch and doesn't let you do tons of stuff.

Eventually AWS is keep adding services with more functionality (SimpleDB, DynamoDB, SQS), while it took quite a while Google to realize that it needs to provide bare servers too. So both approaches converge, but Amazon capture magnitude more revenues from cloud infrastructure.

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So, from the stories I hear; S3 came into being when an engineer in the Retail Org in Seattle ran out of disk storage and couldn't provision a server fast enough. He wrote a '6 pager' and pitched the idea to the S-team (SVPs reporting to Bezos back in the day) who then decided to pursue the business [0].

EC2 was, in some capacity, a tech borrowed from the Alexa (analytics) acquisition, which teams in Cape Town built upon.

SimpleDB (worked upon since 2005, and managed by people acquihired from Junglee.com), morphed into DynamoDB (started 2009-11) pretty immediately as they realised that it was going to be no where near enough.

Bezos personally pursued Werner Vogels to lead the web services initiative sometime in 2003. A lot of folks from the Retail Org, who solved problems of enormous complexities for Amazon.com, the website, got together to create AWS.

[0] Side note: Amazon's top hierarchy meets once every year and decides to invest in two new buinesses Amazon has never been involved in, or markets it can transform due to its involvement in multiple sectors... that's why there's so much happening at any given point in time at Amazon. It's really an incredible place if innovation is what drives you.

Amazon has the coolest stories. I wish I could be a fly on the wall during one of those meetings.

I worked as a system engineer there from 2001-2006. That all sounds a wee bit apocryphal. At the time S3 came into being Amazon was rather insanely jealous of Google and Google Mail's storage capacity and the Google File System whitepaper published in 2003. I can certainly believe that aggravation over not being able to provision storage may have been used to 'sell' that to the S-team and/or might have been the proverbial last straw, but those ideas were all in the air -- "we should build our own GoogleFS" was very common talk. The number of home-grown, shitty distributed filesystems that had no replication and N single points of failure caused all the SEs to pull their hair out -- "oh another royal clusterf*, hand built by yet another software dev team, and tossed over the proverbial chinese wall for us to maintain, when we had no input into the design, awesome..."

I also don't think that EC2 was borrowed from Alexa at all. There were political reasons why that development happened in Cape Town (it insulated them from Seattle politics and in particular from the VP who was over my head who hated the whole idea).

I think Alexa led to the Amazon search engine -- which i thought was called something like a6 (kind of like i18n is short for "internationalization" but with a6 being short for "amazon" -- but that doesn't quite sound right and I think I'm thinking of an Audi -- it was something like that though). They were in SF and setting up a satellite there to hire engineers away from Apple and Google. I also recall them doing some good work on SEO and fixing our URLs and such to get better search placement on Google which drove significant revenue. I don't think they had anything to do with EC2, but there could be some kernel behind the scenes that I wasn't aware of -- however it all smells wrong to me.

I though it was called A9 -- https://www.a9.com/

ah right it was (or 'is' i guess) short for "amazon.com" but with the last 9 characters deleted, including the period...

It is short for algorithm.

That'd be a8

Oh, you can't just give us the set-up and not include the punchline like that. Here's a fuller version of it, in its original point form from Steve Yegge's[1] infamous rant:

...

6)Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.

7)Thank you; have a nice day!

Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.

#6, however, was quite real, so people went to work...

1. https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

> "Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired. Thank you; have a nice day!"

According to the original source, this is incorrect; Jeff Bezos never told people in this memo to have a nice day.

"Google entered game early in 2008 with App Engine. Very powerful"

Empirical observations show that Google never managed to (or never tried to) make App Engine meet the general customers' needs for building their applications. Of cuz, that does not include Snapchat.

Is it because Google did not invest enough, or Google failed to educate and/or engage developers, or Google made a wrong assumption that App Engine would eventually catch up, there is no clear answer.

So overall, I do not think App Engine is 'powerful'. Sure, it has fancy feature and advanced designs. But that does not make something powerful. A powerful tool is one that help users do more with higher efficiency, or enable users to do things that otherwise is impossible or too costly. App Engine might be able to do that, but it was not proved to be true in general.

> AWS started in 2006 with EC2

Actually SQS was the first service.

Alexa information service ("AWIS") was billed as AWS and precedes SQS. It just doesn't remain in the AWS fold. (see https://web.archive.org/web/20050504101424/http://www.amazon... )

> The first AWS service launched for public usage was Simple Queue Service in November 2004

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services

Alexa could be considered as the very first (but it did not remain in the AWS fold): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12024095

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