[nothrabannosir]

I mean, I'm gullible so I believe you, but I also believe Steve Yegge who wrote about this:

> Well, the first big thing Bezos realized is that the infrastructure they'd built for selling and shipping books and sundry could be transformed an excellent repurposable computing platform. So now they have the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and the Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and the Amazon Relational Database Service, and a whole passel' o' other services browsable at aws.amazon.com. These services host the backends for some pretty successful companies, reddit being my personal favorite of the bunch.

https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

(posted in 2011, and he claims he left amazon 6½y before that)

You sound confident so I'm sure there's something to it. But on the other hand, there's loads more, similar comments in that memo.

And Steve, well, Steve is known to be quite the iconoclast. I never took him to suffer fools gladly.

[beering]

Both of you can be right. It's possible that Bezos saw the opportunity in taking advantage of their tech infra expertise and building that into a public product, but maybe it wasn't just taking what they already built and making it public.

[erik_seaberg]

I don't personally know but https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/cloud-computing... makes some strong claims otherwise.

And if AWS were just Amazon's spare capacity, who would bet on their stuff staying up through cyber monday or prime day?

[ascorbic]

Nobody is claiming that it's still just spare capacity, just that it started as that.

[TheGrassyKnoll]

I love this:

    "Bezos is super smart; don't get me wrong.

    He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies."

[scarface74]

Andy Jesse wrote the original business plan for AWS. He says something different.

https://readwrite.com/2012/04/26/popping-the-amazon-web-serv...