Amazon adds ocean freight to the pieces of the shipping puzzle it controls

"Amazon is a logistics company" is a common refrain. It's obviously a core capability and essential to the journey from "bookshop" to "general purpose two-sided global end-to-end fulfilment platform" via ships, drones, planes, self-driving trucks, automated warehousing and so on. This is hardly a surprise but it's still instructive to understand that AWS is also a logistics monster.

There's a quote from James Hamilton from 2014, "Every day, AWS adds enough new server capacity to support all of Amazon’s global infrastructure when it was a $7B annual revenue enterprise (in 2004)." The actual number of facilities elements, computing & storage units is not specified but, you know, it's obviously a lot, and that was three years ago. Imagine the supply chain & logistics required for that constant growth. Layer on the step function of adding each new region or AZ. Realise there's a lag between demand and fulfilment, and consider the impact of failing to meet a demand projection because something shipped late.

Every global public cloud probably shares similar concerns, but I think one reason AWS got to be a first mover is the logistic capability burned into Amazon's DNA.

obdisclosure: I'm ex-AWS, opinions are my own, all facts above are public.