It is Amazon Web Services, and it may sound obvious, but the point is why that Amazon, an
e-commerce site started to give web services in the first place.
There is an interesting story behind it. Once again, this story proves time tested proverb "Necessity is the mother of invention."
What is the necessity behind AWS?
We all know Amazon started as an e-commerce site and has grown exponentially since its inception. The company(site) was growing fast, but the IT associated with it couldn't keep up the same pace.
Customers are increasing to the site, but the computing capacity(IT infrastructure) to handle all the customer traffic was insufficient. This includes storage, computing power, network traffic, Processor, RAM, etc.
Remember, there is no cloud computing or server virtualization at that point. Most applications will have a dedicated CPU, RAM, Hard Disk, etc. An application without a well-known load or network traffic will face significant server issues. Similarly, Amazon.com faces a scaling problem.
More traffic = More computing = More storage = More resources
Less traffic = Less computing = Less storage = Less resource
If you have constant CPU, RAM, or storage, there is no chance of auto-scaling as the resources you have been constant. For example, your desktop/laptop.
If you notice consciously, the problem is that we always think of application and infrastructure as one single entity.
What if we separate the application and infrastructure?
Two folks, Chris Pinkham and Benjamin Black, presented a paper on amazon about this. This eventually evolved into Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS) in cloud computing.
When more sellers sell online, more online visitors log in. Amazon.com relies on a small profit margin as it is an online marketplace that unites sellers and consumers. So they must find ways to keep the infrastructure cost as low as possible. This has eventually led to a team of engineers with a competitive advantage in computer infrastructure and resource optimization compared to other folks in the industry.
I know I am beating around the bush, but I was hoping you could get the essence of AWS with the necessity of it in the background. I think there is no use in learning how to open an AWS account/create an EC2 instance/S3 bucket etc., without knowing their need in the first place.
Amazon started as an e-commerce store and became a cloud computing giant AWS, one of the best serendipity stories of all time.
