The New Automation Mindset

CHAPTER 19The Future of the Enterprise

“Today, do what others won't so tomorrow you can accomplish what others can't.”

—Simone Biles

“The internet is entering its Lego era” announced a New York Times article in 2006.¹ The article listed building blocks that developers used as they stitched together what became known as “Web 2.0.” One of these building blocks was a recent announcement from Amazon called S3, or Super Simple Storage, the root of what became known as Amazon Web Services, or AWS.

Today, AWS is a cornerstone of cloud computing, but the platform had simple beginnings. It was new to the world in 2006, but the origin story goes all the way back to 2000. At the time, Amazon was trying to roll out e‐commerce solutions for third‐party vendors. As Amazon CEO Andy Jassy (who was Jeff Bezos's chief of staff back then) tells it. their developers were frustrated with the amount of time they were spending building and maintaining infrastructure. They felt like they were reinventing the wheel. What they were trying to build for their customers was not possible with their software stack. “Around the year 2000, we became a services company and really found religion around a service‐oriented architecture, very quietly,” said Jassy at a 2017 lecture.²

They asked all their technical teams to have well‐developed APIs available for other teams to use at Amazon. That posture gave them the nimble structure to deliver services for Merchant.com. It also gave them an idea. If they were ...