Amazon Web Services and the Birth of the Cloud in 2006
In 2006 Amazon launched S3 and EC2 and began renting computing by the hour. Learn how AWS started cloud computing and how it relates to VPS and web hosting.
In March 2006, Amazon launched a storage service called S3. In August of the same year, it opened a computing service called EC2 to the public in a limited beta. Between them, they let anyone rent storage and computers over the internet and pay only for what they used. This was the beginning of what we now call public cloud computing, and it changed how a large part of the internet is built.
Where the idea came from
Amazon had grown from an online bookshop into a large e-commerce platform, and its engineers had built a lot of internal infrastructure to run it. By the early 2000s, the company was trying to make its systems more modular, with services that expose clear interfaces to each other. The company has said that this experience convinced it that the infrastructure it had built could be offered as a product to other developers. The popular claim that Amazon started AWS only to use up spare capacity after the holiday season is an oversimplification, and the company's own account emphasises the value of the infrastructure services themselves.
An early AWS offering was a set of web services for e-commerce data in 2002. The first infrastructure service was the Simple Queue Service (SQS) in 2004. S3 and EC2 in 2006 are the services most associated with the launch of cloud computing.
What was new
Renting servers was not new. Hosting companies had rented dedicated servers for years, and virtual private servers existed. What the early AWS services added was a combination of features:
- An API. You could create and destroy servers with programs, not by sending a request to a human.
- Pay as you go. Billing by usage, rather than a monthly commitment, lowered the barrier for experiments.
- On-demand capacity. A start-up could begin with a few machines and add more within minutes.
- Building blocks. Storage, compute, queues and databases could be combined in many ways.
For a start-up, this meant that growth no longer required buying hardware in advance. Many companies that became well known in the following years built their early services on this model.
Others join
| Year | Development |
|---|---|
| 2006 | Amazon S3 and EC2 |
| 2008 | Google App Engine previewed, a platform for hosting applications |
| 2010 | Microsoft Azure becomes generally available; OpenStack launched as an open-source cloud platform |
| 2013 | Docker introduced containers to a wide audience |
| 2014 | AWS Lambda introduced the idea of serverless functions |
The word "cloud" itself had been used for years in network diagrams to represent the part of a network that someone else ran. It became a marketing term for these services.
Cloud, VPS and shared hosting compared
Many people ask how the cloud differs from the hosting products that existed before. In practice the categories overlap, and providers use the terms in different ways. In general:
- Shared hosting gives you space on a server managed by the host, with a control panel. It is the simplest option and suits typical small sites.
- A VPS gives you a virtual machine with guaranteed resources and root access. You manage the operating system and software.
- A dedicated server gives you a whole physical machine for demanding workloads.
- Public cloud offers a large catalogue of services, billed by usage, with scaling and automation tools. It is powerful, and it is also more complex, and the bill can be hard to predict if you are not careful.
The effect on how software is built
The cloud encouraged practices that are now standard: infrastructure described in code, automated deployment, and architectures made of many small services. It also made it normal to design for failure, since individual servers may disappear at any time. For large applications with unpredictable traffic, these are strong advantages. For a company website, a blog or a small shop, they are often unnecessary, and the added complexity can cost more than it saves.
Questions to ask before choosing
- Is my traffic steady or very spiky?
- Do I need to run custom software, or only a standard CMS?
- Who will administer the server, and do they have the time?
- Is a predictable monthly price important to me?
The cost question
Pay-as-you-go pricing is attractive when usage is small or unpredictable, and it can become expensive for a steady workload that runs all day, every day. Bandwidth leaving the provider's network is often billed separately, and managed services add up. Companies that moved large workloads to the public cloud have sometimes found that renting fixed-size servers or running their own hardware costs less for predictable loads. That is not an argument against the cloud, only a reminder to understand how you are billed before you choose. For a typical website the predictable monthly price of a hosting plan removes that uncertainty altogether.
The lesson for site owners
The cloud is a tool, not a requirement. Most sites do well on a straightforward plan, and a simple setup has fewer parts that can go wrong. If your needs grow, you can move up. Zebra Hosting offers a ladder from shared hosting to VPS and dedicated servers, with the same price at every renewal, and our comparison page can help you decide where you fit.
