> Neither did AWS when they started. They were just building out data centers to run their little book website and decided to start selling the excess capacity.

> Neither did AWS when they started. They were just building out data centers to run their little book website and decided to start selling the excess capacity. This is a myth. It simply isn't true. AWS was conceived as a greenfield business by its first CEO. Besides, S3 and SQS were the first AWS services; EC2 didn't appear till a few years later. And it wasn't built from excess Amazon server capacity; it was totally separate.