Amazon launched the first widely recognized commercial cloud-computing service in 2006.
Amazon Web Services began offering infrastructure over the internet rather than requiring customers to buy and maintain their own servers. Amazon S3, introduced on March 14, 2006, provided scalable cloud storage, while Amazon EC2 followed in August with rentable virtual computing capacity. Together, these services helped establish the modern infrastructure-as-a-service model.
The idea grew from Amazon’s own retail technology. Engineers had been working toward standardized, automated infrastructure that could be accessed through web services. Amazon realized that the same spare computing and storage capacity could become a product for outside developers and businesses.
A common mix-up is treating AWS as if it began from nothing in 2006. Amazon had already launched developer-oriented web services in 2002, and AWS released Simple Queue Service in beta in 2004. However, 2006 is the key date for its generally available infrastructure cloud, the model that made on-demand, pay-as-you-go computing commercially prominent.