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>They had a ton of spare resources

Is this true? There was the story about the resources they need for Christmas shopping that went unused for the rest of the year.

But recently somebody mentioned here (I don't remember where) that AWS was a separate business and that Amazon itself initially didn't use any resources from AWS.



That’s correct, the multi year project was known internally as MAWS - Move to AWS.


building a public cloud is more or less a rebuild of any infrastructure you currently have. it would be just unwise for a company to build their private cloud with the same trade offs as public cloud.

so while there’s the ideal state of running amazon on a large multi tenant cloud, there was absolutely no safe and reasonable path to making that happen by extending the existing infra. it would’ve also hampered aws by forcing them to focus way too large way too early.




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