10 Lessons from 10 Years of Amazon Web Services

The epoch of AWS is the launch of Amazon S3 on March 14, 2006, now almost 10 years ago. Looking back over the past 10 years, there are hundreds of lessons that we’ve learned about building and operating services that need to be secure, reliable, scalable, with predictable performance at the lowest possible cost. Given that AWS is a pioneer in building and operating these services world-wide, these lessons have been of crucial importance to our business. As we’ve said many times before, “There is no compression algorithm for experience.” With over a million active customers per month, who in turn may serve hundreds of millions of their own customers, there is no lack of opportunities to gain more experience and perhaps no better environment for continuous improvement in the way we serve our customers. I have picked a few of these lessons to share with you in the hope that they may be of use for you as well.