What is the name of Amazon's first AWS service launched in 2004?

Amazon Simple Queue Service was the first AWS service launched for public use in 2004.

SQS introduced a way for software components to exchange messages through a durable queue instead of communicating directly. That helped developers build systems that could absorb traffic spikes and process work asynchronously—an important foundation for scalable cloud applications.

The date needs a small historical qualification. SQS appeared as a beta service in late 2004, while its production release and general availability came later, in 2006. AWS also had earlier Amazon Web Services APIs for accessing Amazon’s retail catalog, but those were not the infrastructure-cloud services usually meant by “AWS.”

A common mix-up is Amazon S3, which launched in March 2006 and became one of AWS’s best-known early services. Amazon EC2 followed in August 2006. SQS came first in the infrastructure-service timeline, preceding both storage and rented virtual-computing instances.