Origins of Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2)
Amazon's cloud services have been the subject of many articles. The book Working Backwards explains how Amazon Web Services came to be. Only two of the initial half-dozen services were successful, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2). EC2 is at the core of what we consider Amazon's cloud computing service. Without EC2, Amazon's "cloud" would not be a cloud. Previously, developers had to request a physical or virtual server if they needed a computer. Virtual servers were much easier to obtain than physical servers; however, getting a virtual computer still required installing and maintaining a physical set of servers. The virtual server is a physical server that appears as one or more virtual servers.
While there are many claims about the origins of cloud computing, Amazon's EC2 was to be the first actual implementation in August of 2006. EC2 was a service; the consumer did not set up physical infrastructure. Developers called an API to get a cloud computer. They could use one API call to request one server or thousands of servers. These servers were only billed by the hour and therefore kept development costs down. It was also possible to make one or a thousand computers disappear with another API call. The growth of Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, Zoom, and many services would not have been possible without EC2.
EC2 originated when two Amazon employees, Chris Pinkerton and Ben Black, wrote a paper in 2003 describing how Amazon could sell virtual servers as a service. As of this point, Amazon had a massive automated infrastructure that enabled these services to potential customers for a relatively low cost. In 2004, Chris Pinkham, head of its IT infrastructure, told the Amazon CIO that he wanted to leave Amazon and return to South Africa with his family. The CIO suggested opening an office in Cape Town instead of leaving Amazon. They decided to build on the 2003 paper Chris and Ben wrote. Pinkham asked Chris Brown to move his family to South Africa and lead the engineering project. Chris and I worked together at Chef and today consider him a good friend.
Keep this in mind when you hear some Amazon muckety muck talk about how brilliant their cloud strategy was; EC2 was Amazon's 3M sticky note. Elastic Compute Cloud was built in isolation. It was off the radar in Seattle. In the book "The Everything Store," Pinkham said that solitude was beneficial because it allowed him to keep away from Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos. He said, "I spent most of my time hiding from Bezos," and, "Bezos was a fun guy to talk to, but you did not want to be his pet project. He would love it to distraction." The story goes that when EC2 was completed, the new head of infrastructure refused to connect it to Amazon's core network. The use of EC2 by all of Amazon didn't start until 2010, according to Jon Jenkins' presentation at this year's Velocity Conference.
Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon
