I feel like that top answer has a lot of things wrong with it. The first AWS service was SQS in 2002. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services#Histor

I feel like that top answer has a lot of things wrong with it. The first AWS service was SQS in 2002. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services#History The wiki also says that AWS changed direction after a paper was written about reworking the retail compute infrastructure. It had a small section saying that they could sell excess compute as part of the rework. After that paper came out they relaunched AWS in 2006 with S3, SQS and EC2.