Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

by Brad Stone

In the years after the introduction of its first products in 2006, AWS was used mostly by startups and university labs that needed extra processing power and signed up with a credit card to run their software over the internet on Amazon’s servers. When engineers inside corporations and governments wanted to run their computing experiments via AWS, they often quietly routed around their organizations’ stringent procurement processes. Like many other technology revolutions, cloud computing was first the provenance of geeks, and then spread outward. The first companies to embrace AWS became its beta testers and evangelists. Silicon Valley startups like Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox, and the photo-sharing site SmugMug ran their operations on AWS and could quickly order up more servers as their businesses grew at unprecedented rates. It was one of the greatest enablers of the post-recession technology boom—arguably more important than even the iPhone, though outsiders understood very little about it. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, signed up in 2009 and used AWS to store and stream images from the Curiosity Rover on the surface of Mars. “I still have the presentation I gave to colleagues,” said Tom Soderstrom, JPL’s chief technology officer. “They thought I was talking about earth science, literal clouds.”