20 Years Ago, Amazon Started Renting Computing Power by the Hour—and Changed Its Future

EC2 has powered the likes of Airbnb, Slack, and Instagram. Now it’s part of the $42.2 billion AWS unit.

BY CHRIS MORRIS @MORRISATLARGE

At a resort in Cabo San Lucas in 2006, Amazon’s Jeff Barr put his family vacation on hold for a bit and began writing a blog entry about a new service the company was introducing. A towel covered his laptop screen so he could block the glare of the sun and see what he was writing. When he pressed publish, by his recollection possibly from a lounge chair near the pool, he had no........

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