The Prime Effect: Inside The Rise Of Amazon Web Services

Table of Contents

If you use Slack at work, Zoom for school or binge watch Netflix at home, guess what? You’re also using Amazon. Amazon Web Services currently controls 30% of the cloud computing market. The fourth installment in our series The Prime Effect goes inside AWS, one of the biggest parts of Amazon you may have never heard of.

Guests

Tim Bray, senior principal technologist, then VP and distinguished engineer at Amazon Web Services from December 2014 to May 2020. He quit Amazon due to moral concerns about the treatment of warehouse workers. (@timbray)

Michael Cusumano, SMR distinguished professor of management and deputy dean at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Author of “The Business of Platforms.”

Also Featured

Werner Vogels, chief technology officer at Amazon. (@Werner)

Rep. David Cicilline, he represents Rhode Island’s 1st congressional district. Chair of the House subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law. (@davidcicilline)

From The Reading List

Seattle Times: “In the 15 years since its launch, Amazon Web Services transformed how companies do business” — “It enables glitch-free Netflix streaming. It hosts digital drug-design tools of the kind that led to Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine. The Seahawks use its computing power to analyze game data. It stores a digital repository of King County’s archives.”

Tim Bray’s GitHub: “AWS Becomes ‘A-Cloud,’ an Independent Entity” — ” Today, at AWS re:Invent, Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy jointly announced A-Cloud, a new Delaware corporation which will assume ownership of Amazon Web Services’ assets and become the employer of existing AWS employees.”

Protocol: “AWS has avoided antitrust scrutiny. That could change.” — “The days of AWS flying under the antitrust radar are over. Cloud computing has grown at a dizzying speed since 2006, when AWS launched its first cloud service.”

Seattle Times: “Get to know Amazon’s new cloud-computing chief, ‘water skier, wine guy’ Adam Selipsky” — “Amazon’s main money-spinner has a new boss. Ex-Tableau Software CEO Adam Selipsky returned to his old stomping grounds at Amazon Web Services this month — this time at its helm.”