Amazon launches S3 and EC2, starting the cloud
Amazon rents out the spare infrastructure it built to run its own store
Quick facts
- S3 launched
- 14 March 2006
- EC2 launched
- Limited beta, 25 August 2006
- Parent company
- Amazon.com
- Core idea
- Renting storage and compute as a metered service
What happened
Amazon had learned, running its own retail business, how expensive and difficult it was to provision and manage computing infrastructure, which distracted engineering teams from building the actual product. On 14 March 2006, Amazon launched Simple Storage Service (S3), letting any customer store data on Amazon's own servers instead of buying and maintaining storage hardware; 12,000 developers signed up within a single day. Amazon followed a few months later, in a limited public beta announced 25 August 2006, with Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which gave customers on-demand access to computing power itself, letting them run applications on Amazon's servers rather than their own, paid for by usage rather than owned outright.
Why it matters
S3 and EC2 turned computing infrastructure into a utility a startup could rent by the hour instead of capital equipment it had to buy upfront, removing one of the biggest barriers to launching a new internet company and setting the pattern every other major cloud provider, including Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, later followed.
How we know
Amazon Web Services documents its own founding motivation and the S3 and EC2 launch dates directly, describing the shift from owning hardware to renting infrastructure as a service.
Sources
- Amazon Web Services. Our Origins · Primary source (author-declared)aws.amazon.com · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Amazon Web Services. Eight Years (And Counting) of Cloud Computing · General sourceaws.amazon.com · Cited as a "reference" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Related timelines
- Artificial Intelligence → · The rentable, on-demand compute AWS pioneered later became the infrastructure that trained and served large-scale machine learning models.