February 2011
Intermediate to advanced
186 pages
5h 12m
English
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Foreword
March 14, 2006, was an important day, even though it is unlikely that it will ever become more than a footnote in some history books. On that day, Amazon Web Services launched the first of its utility computing services: the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). In my eyes that was the day that changed the way IT was done; it gave everyone access to an ultra-reliable and highly scalable storage service without having to invest tens of thousands of dollars for an exclusive enterprise storage solution. And even better, the service sat directly on the Internet, and objects were directly HTTP addressable.
The motivation behind the launch of the service was simple: the AWS team had asked itself what innovation could happen if it could give everyone access to the same scalable and reliable technologies that were available to Amazon engineers. A student in her dorm room could have an idea that could become the next Amazon or the next Google, and the only thing that would hold her back was access to the resources needed to fulfill that potential. AWS aimed at removing these barriers and constraints so people could unleash their innovation and focus on building great new products instead of having to invest in infrastructure both intellectually and financially.
Today, Amazon S3 has grown to store more than 260 billion objects and routinely runs more than 200,000 storage operations per second. The service has become a fundamental ...