It's cool to read this.

One interesting tidbit is that during the period this author writes about, AWS had a roughly 4-day outage (impacted at least EC2, EBS, and RDS, iirc), caused by EBS, that really shook folks' confidence in AWS.

It resulted in a reorg and much deeper investment in EBS as a standalone service.

It also happened around the time Apple was becoming a customer, and AWS in general was going through hockey-stick growth thanks to startup adoption (Netflix, Zynga, Dropbox, etc).

It's fun to read about these technical and operational bits, but technical innovation in production is messy, and happens against a backdrop of Real Business Needs.

I wish more of THOSE stories were told as well.