The Origins of Amazon's Cloud Computing
GigaOM by Stacey Higginbotham · · Article
"I was horrified at the thought of the dirty, public Internet touching MY beautiful operations."
I told Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOM the actual origin of EC2. Chris Pinkham wanted to keep working from South Africa, and I, running ops at Amazon, was at first horrified by the idea.
Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOM traces EC2 to Chris Pinkham and Christopher Brown's remote team in Cape Town, with Werner Vogels as executive sponsor; Jesse Robbins, running availability at the time, recounts his initial resistance in the piece.
Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOM reconstructed the actual origin of Amazon’s cloud computing platform. Chris Pinkham, an Amazon engineer, wanted to return home to South Africa, and Amazon agreed to let him keep working from Cape Town. Pinkham and Christopher Brown built the small remote team that designed and shipped the first virtualized server platform inside Amazon, the system that became EC2.
I was running availability at Amazon at the time, and I told Stacey I had initially resisted the project. “I was horrified at the thought of the dirty, public Internet touching MY beautiful operations.” Pinkham and Brown built their platform in a separate data center, outside my operational perimeter. Werner Vogels was the executive sponsor who created the space for them to do it.
The piece ends with a line from Carl Brooks that the operations posture at Amazon helped create the conditions for the platform that would invert it, an early instance of the pattern I had named three years earlier on O’Reilly Radar: you become what you disrupt.
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Since this came out…
- AWS finished 2024 at a roughly $115B annualized revenue run rate. The platform the operations team resisted is now larger than Amazon's original retail business at the time EC2 launched.
- Amazon's 15th-anniversary EC2 retrospective confirmed the same arc Stacey published in 2010: Chris Pinkham relocating to South Africa, the small Cape Town team, and the bet that turned EC2 into the foundation of AWS. [AWS retrospective](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/happy-15th-birthday-amazon-ec2/)