> The creation of EC2 originally (which at the time was not AWS -- AWS was originally the XML-RPC and SOAP APIs that allowed people to interact with the www.ama

> The creation of EC2 originally (which at the time was not AWS -- AWS was originally the XML-RPC and SOAP APIs that allowed people to interact with the www.amazon.com website) was done by a skunkworks project in South Africa. AWS did indeed start out with E-commerce Services (2002) and Alexa Internet APIs (2004), but in mid-2003, when Andy Jassy took over AWS from Colin Bryar, he completely changed its charter to build an "Internet Operating System" instead. EC2 happened in South Africa in 2004 after Jassy and others had ear-marked compute as one of the key building blocks, along with Storage (S3) and Database (RDS / SimpleDB). In fact, S3 launched before EC2 did. SQS launched even before that, in 2004, though in limited beta. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWS#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWS#History