Like any large dotcom in the early 00s, Amazon ran its own datacentre, spending millions on servers and software. But at the beginning, it had just one customer: Amazon.īefore it was Amazon Web Services, it was just Amazon’s backend technology. Its customer list is huge running from Adobe and Airbnb to Yelp and Zapproved, via the UK Ministry of Justice and Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. More than 35% of all network traffic in North America is Netflix, Amazon Instant Video’s biggest rival. More than 35% of all network traffic in North America is Netflix, and all of that ultimately comes from Amazon’s servers. I employed it when I decided to train a neural network to write Guardian leaders: work that would have taken around 50 hours on my laptop took eight when I employed Amazon’s specialised hardware to do the job, and cost around £4.Īt the other end of the scale, Netflix uses AWS for almost all its backend infrastructure, storing and streaming its web series from the same servers as its direct competitor, Amazon Instant Video – servers which Amazon owns. The sort of people who use AWS are almost as varied as the people who shop at Amazon. Now, AWS is moving into the third stage of its life, providing the underpinning for Amazon’s own quest to dominate not just our shopping, but our homes themselves.
It began as almost a point of principle for Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, before evolving to become the single most profitable part of the entire company. It lets companies and individuals avoid the hassle of buying and running their own hardware, while also letting them pay for only what they actually use. You can buy storage space to hold a huge database, bandwidth to host a website, or processing power to run complex software remotely. The division is Amazon Web Services, or AWS, the section of the company that sells cloud computing services to both the outside world and to Amazon itself. It’s responsible for a full tenth of the company’s revenues, yet its “operating income” – the amount of money it leaves in Amazon’s coffers once expenses are accounted for – dwarfs any other sector, pulling in $861m compared to the $255m Amazon makes in North American sales and the $541m it loses internationally. Photograph: Mikael Buck/Rex/Shutterstockīut there’s another chunk of Amazon that you’re less likely to know about.
Amazon Echo voice-controlled speakers, which went on sale in the UK last September.
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