A Haiku for Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud Fifth Birthday

Happy Fifth Birthday
Cloud Computing Now For Real
Began with You, EC2

Wow… Amazon Web Service’s cloud computing platform EC2 is 5 years old today. That’s a whole lot of innovation in just half a decade. Where did the time go? Seems like just yesterday the founding engineering team at Sonian was dipping a toe in the cloud-computing-waters (or should that be sticking a “finger in the air?”) proving out the concept of building an enterprise-focused SaaS solution powered solely by Amazon S3 and EC2.

The idea of virtually unlimited compute processing for ten cents an hour with no up-front capital expenditures was too alluring to ignore. Plus Amazon S3 storage was the most reliable storage available at fifteen cents a gigabyte per month. Amazon’s cloud offering created a level playing field, allowing young, small start-up teams to compete with likes of Google in terms of solving a big problem for a big audience without needing to have the bank account of a big company. (The big bank accounts can come later.)

In late Summer 2006-era thinking it certainly was a leap to think that a business could trust their compute and storage infrastructure needs to an online e-commerce vendor (Heard on the street: “What does Amazon know about hosting compute and storage?” …. Turns out quite a bit, thank you). I recall circulating the original Sonian business plan to local investors and getting a lot of negative feedback about using Amazon. Fast forward to 2011, investors now demand that their start-ups use AWS to be capital efficient during the formative technology building stages.

The attitudes toward cloud computing in general, and Amazon Web Services specifically, have made a full 180 shift from the skeptical minds five years ago. As Jeff Bezos said recently, “you have to be prepared to be misunderstood for a long time” in order to prevail. As is the case in times when there is rapid change (like the advent of cloud computing,) eventually the best way forward emerges and gains the respect of the masses.