The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

by Brad Stone

The shift to offering these infrastructure services actually began with the transition to Gurupa and a more reliable technology infrastructure, a process that gathered momentum in 2003. While Amazon’s internal systems had been broken down into more durable individual components, Amazon’s technical staff was still organized conventionally as a single team, headquartered in a separate office building downtown near Seattle’s Union Station. This group strictly controlled who could access Amazon’s servers, and various teams inside the company had to plead for resources to try out their new projects and features. The process slowed down and frustrated many Amazon project managers. “You had a set of folks running these machines who were the priesthood of hardware, and the rest of us were railing against it,” says Chris Brown, a software-development manager at the time. “We wanted a playground where we could go to freely try things out.”