Most of the platforms we use every day are built on AWS or other cloud providers.
Just look around.
- Entertainment → Netflix
- Inspiration → Pinterest
- Learning → Coursera, Udemy
- Networking & jobs → LinkedIn
- Music → Spotify
When I started learning cloud computing, I noticed a pattern.
Almost every modern application relies on AWS or another cloud provider in some form.
And that led me to a question that felt almost paradoxical:
How did AWS build AWS… without AWS?
At that point, it stopped being a simple question.
It felt like something fundamental I was missing.
Why This Question Matters
We often learn cloud computing through services and certifications:
EC2.
S3.
IAM.
Lambda.
But before understanding what these services are, it helps to understand why cloud computing had to exist in the first place.
So, let’s go back in time.
The World Before Cloud (Early 2000s)
Imagine running Amazon in the early 2000s.
Festive seasons like:
- Halloween
- Diwali
- Christmas
meant massive and unpredictable traffic spikes.
But infrastructure was static.
Amazon had to:
- Buy physical servers
- Predict traffic months in advance
- Maintain hardware 24/7
- Hope nothing failed during peak sales
If traffic was low, servers stayed idle and wasted money.
If traffic spiked, systems crashed.
Scaling wasn’t elastic.
It was expensive, slow, and stressful.
Running Amazon wasn’t just about writing good code.
It was about surviving infrastructure challenges.
Internal Challenges at Amazon
As Amazon grew, another problem emerged.
Each internal team:
- Built and managed its own infrastructure
- Used different tools and processes
- Deployed at different speeds
Engineers were spending more time managing servers than delivering features.
Jeff Bezos identified the bottleneck clearly:
Infrastructure was slowing innovation.
For a fast-growing company, this was unacceptable.
The Shift in Thinking
Amazon wasn’t trying to invent cloud computing.
They were trying to remove friction from development.
So they made a critical decision.
They centralized infrastructure.
Instead of teams owning servers, Amazon created internal services:
- Storage as a service
- Compute as a service
- Infrastructure exposed through APIs
Teams could now request resources on demand, similar to how electricity is consumed.
This approach wasn’t called cloud yet.
It was simply a solution to a real operational problem.
How AWS Was Built Without AWS
What we now know as AWS started as:
- Internal tools
- Shared data centers
- Programmatic access to compute and storage
- A pay-for-what-you-use mindset
The questions engineers asked began to change.
Not:
“Which server should I deploy on?”
But:
“How much compute or storage do I need?”
That shift laid the foundation of modern cloud computing.
When Cloud Became Public
Amazon soon realized something important.
If they needed this system to scale efficiently,
other companies would need it too.
In 2006, Amazon launched:
- Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
- Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
For the first time, developers could:
- Rent servers by the hour
- Scale infrastructure globally
- Build applications without owning hardware
Cloud computing officially became a public platform.
The Core Lesson
Cloud computing wasn’t invented as a product.
It was invented as a response to pain.
It exists because:
- Hardware was expensive
- Scaling was slow
- Infrastructure blocked innovation
Cloud removed that barrier.
And let developers focus on building.
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