Convopage
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I was at Amzn in 2000 when the internet bubble popped. Capital markets dried up & we were burning $1B/yr. Our biggest expense was datacenter -> expensive Sun servers. We spent a year ripping out Sun & replacing with HP/Linux, which formed the foundation for AWS. The backstory:
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My first week at Amzn in '99 I saw McNealy in the elevator on his way to Bezos' office. Sun Microsystems was one of the most valuable companies in the world at that time (peak market cap >$300B). In those days, buying Sun was like buying IBM: "nobody ever got fired for it"
Our motto was "get big fast." Site stability was critical - every second of downtime was lost sales - so we spent big $$ to keep the site up. Sun servers were the most reliable so all internet co's used them back then, even though Sun's proprietary stack was expensive & sticky.
In 2000, brand new Sun servers started appearing on eBay for 10 cents on the dollar as VC-backed start-ups went out of business (this was pre-AWS when you had to roll your own datacenter). Amzn could have negotiated a better deal with Sun, but Jeff chose a more radical approach.
Amazon's CTO was Rick Dalzell - ex-Walmart, hard-charging operator. He pivoted the entire eng org to replace Sun with HP/Linux. Linux kernel was released in '94, same year Jeff started Amzn. 6 years later we were betting the company on it, a novel and risky approach at the time.
Product development ground to a halt during the transition, we froze all new features for over a year. We had a huge backlog but nothing could ship until we completed the shift to Linux. I remember an all-hands where one of our eng VPs flashed an image of a snake swallowing a rat
This coincided with - and further contributed to - deceleration in revenue growth as we also had to raise prices to slow burn. It was a viscous cycle, and we were running out of time as we ran out of money. Amzn came within a few quarters of going bankrupt around this time.
But once we started the transition to Linux, there was no going back. All hands on deck refactoring our code base, replacing servers, preparing for the cutover. If it worked, infra costs would go down by 80%+. If it failed, the website would fall over and the company would die.
We finally completed the transition, just in time and without a hitch. It was a huge accomplishment for the entire engineering team. The site chugged on with no disruption. Capex was massively reduced overnight. And we suddenly had an infinitely scalable infrastructure.
Then something even more interesting happened. As a retailer we had always faced huge seasonality, with traffic and revenue surging every Nov/Dec. Jeff started to think - we have all this excess server capacity for 46 weeks/year, why not rent it out to other companies?
Around this same time, Jeff was also interested in decoupling internal dependencies so teams could build without being gated by other teams. The architectural changes required to enable this loosely coupled model became the API primitives for AWS.
These were foundational insights for AWS. I remember Jeff presenting at an all-hands, he framed the idea in the context of the electric grid. In 1900, a business had to build its own generator to open a shop. Why should a business in 2000 have to build its own datacenter?
Cloud infrastructure would have emerged eventually even w/out AWS (like electric vehicles w/out Tesla), but how much later and at what opportunity cost ? After the cost of starting a company was reduced dramatically by AWS, innovation exploded and the modern VC ecosystem was born
Amzn nearly died in 2000-2003. But without this crisis, it's unlikely the company would have made the hard decision to shift to a completely new architecture. And without that shift, AWS may never have happened. Never let a good crisis go to waste!
PS: Amzn recently spent years ripping out Oracle, something few have attempted. It takes muscle to do hard things, and muscle gets built by doing hard things. The best companies look at every challenge as an opportunity and engrave that mindset into their culture.
If it's hard and you win, it's a moat
Thank you for sharing this Dan. Simply incredible!
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Didn't 1-800-Flowers help a bit?
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So true
Cool thread! Thanks for sharing.
tired of correcting everything wrong with this thread. utter nonsense hagiography.
Mind giving a link to where you did it before?
dude's just a Marxist with an axe to grind. probably was in kindergarten when all this was going down.
Great story! I’m pretty sure Tesla built their own internal software to replace sales force. Seems to be the trend to vertically integrate as much as possible.
If the cost margins are big enough (eg, the vendor's profit margins are paid for by customers like you)
We seem to cycle between aaS and in-housing, at the small end, aaS seems to still be viable until scale kicks in.
That’s was awesome. Please write a book!
What is Amazon replacing Oracle with?
Aurora
oracle replacing aurora.. 😬😬
Such a great read. Thanks !!!
The part that really staggers my mind is, how are Oracle getting new clients these days. I can understand them having their legacy hooks into customers, and putting new hooks in other customers by acquisition, but...
Who would choose to sign on with Oracle in 2021?
I worked for a company who signed a new contract with Oracle in 2019....
Key word there is _worked_
Probably a very Sears thing to do
Or a bank maybe
Or health insurance: something where you can easily pass on the costs to *something* and nobody blinks
The whole thread is awesome, but this bit about building muscle by doing hard things—and then that giving the company the strength AND confidence to do more hard things—is so true.
Just listened to your podcast from February 2020 and really enjoyed the stories about Amazon and Facebook specifically.
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Now, I want to hear the story about what replaced Oracle and how well/bad that went.
Well summarized ! It happened with network stack and story goes on ! The next will be applications, it has already started and probably will accelerate more
I still remember visiting Amazon as a kernel developer to help get an issue with HP branded MegaRAIDs fixed back then... How far things have come since then!
What did Amazon replace Oracle with and why did they replace Oracle.
And now companies are spending resources ripping out Amazon out of their tech and real stack.
When you get big enough...
But Amazon is not the only firm reducing Oracle footprint smaller ISVs are also doing it.
Good times back then. Thanks for the thread.
Now I want a thread on the Oracle ripping.
Great thread ... thank you for sharing. I was a Commodity Manager in charge of Logic, Linear & Sparc processors at that time. Lived through the tech bubble & crisis really does create opportunity.
Ahhh, I was working at Sun (and later Oracle) when all this was going down. Rode a lot of stock shares right into the ground. Too soon! 😀
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While you were in Seattle in '99 doing tech, I was at the DE facility. I was the first trainer in "the cage." Taught prisoners on work release how to pick CDs. TaeBo release over Thanksgiving wknd slayed me. Still have the 1st non media item sold: a Dilbert window cling toy.
I have no memory of a year long halt. Quite the opposite. We shipped like crazy 24/7. Stock split over and over.
Dan didn't say there was a halt in service. Just an internal halt of development while the infrastructure project rolled out (Sun->Linux).
Thanks! Sorry to have misread that!
Plus there’s the benefits of exploiting workers, killing off competitors, and being allowed to build a de facto monopoly.
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Beautiful write up.. Inspiring
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I was at Amzn in 2000 when the internet bubble popped. Capital markets dried up & we were burnin rattibha.com/thread/1347677… Have a good day!
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Man, one of best Twitter streams I’ve read recently.
First one through the wall always gets bloodied 👊🏻👊🏻
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Thanks for sharing Dan 🙏
Dang. Impressive stuff from the kid I worked with at Mercer back in the 90’s!
and now amz is devouring everyone else ... hope you very smart guys saw that coming too while excited on building a gigantic monster eating all around it #thebigtechpurge
Unroll me
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Nice insights. Thanks for sharing :)
Great story thanks for sharing, what's the opportunity out of this crisis I wonder?!
Unless ripping out Oracle means replacing it with Vertica, this has got to be one of the stupidest fucking things to do. This is why I hate IT so much...
While I worked in Oracle a few years back, we spent our time ripping out Amazon from our infrastructure 🤷♂️ I’m not sure this really says much except for that the two companies decided to compete on harsher terms and dedicated some engineering effort to it.
Was that was around the time when Oracle failed to deliver the Airforce $1 billion planning application?
When COTS costs too much: Oracle, the US Air Force, and a $1 billion project failure
The United States Air Force recently announced that the $1 billion you were hoping would be spent on something useful (or not at all) has been lost forever to Oracle and Computer Sciences Corp. in …
eaconsult.com
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The price of assuming exploitation of customers because your stack is too big to fail, I guess.
Excellent thread. Thanks for sharing
What a thread !!! Thanks for sharing this seeming behind the scene tenacity and importance of decision making in crises. Wow I enjoyed reading and some key lesson learned also.
Phenomenal. Thanks for sharing.
you capricious goddess please unroll
Great thread - Thanks for sharing What did they replace Oracle with?
Are the using posgress instead?
So why has $AMZN ripped out Oracle?
Good riddance to Oracle, overpriced, overhyped, and unable to scale massively.
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Very interesting read. Thank you
Tell us the Oracle story too!
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Nice thread, thanks
I love these stories
At @ESPNcricinfo we made the decision to go all in on Linux from the start (1996/7) (gopher server before that) because we bootstrapped and couldn’t afford anything else. 20m UUs in 2000 and never a hitch delivering live coverage.
Crisis and opportunity are two faces or the same coin.
A shift from Sun to Linux in 2000 had to be a really brave move. And look at AWS now!
never let a good crisis go to waste!
What came first, aws or sun’s network.com? I think they tried the same cloud business model, but done Sun’s way
Except that it was a self-created crisis.
AWS EC2 is essentially same as virtual private servers which pre-date AWS. AWS pioneered provisioning resources on-demand, but web hosting without building your own datacenter was definitely possible before AWS.
I’m curious - why do you say “VC ecosystem” instead of “startup ecosystem”?
Interesting way to frame it - I think the priority might be backwards
Think VCs are part of the startup eco, not the reverse
Startups can exist without VCs, but VCs can’t exist without startups 🙂
"I don't know about you people, but I don't want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do." - Gavin Belson / Jeff Bezos
Exodus..com. :(
The really painful irony for Sun is that they were already renting computers
Hackers put the futility back in Sun's grid utility
DOS attack - or the Slashdot effect?
theregister.com
you’re the modern day Edison
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This is untrue, timesharing systems were the brainchild of John Mccarthy 1961.
This analogy of internet based resources and electric grid - it was first given by Scott Mcnealy.
We've had remote terminals and job submission grids for a while, so decentralized compute isn't that novel.
Even DE Shaw himself (Bezo's old boss) came from compchem, where offsite compute is a thing. packaging and monetization though...
good story
I particularly love this part. “It was a good idea 100 years ago, why not again?” Simple and brilliant
this is not correct. the move to microservices, with associated API-based decoupling, was in progress for years before EC2 and the EC2 API was not in any way coordinated with the retail service teams. moving retail to EC2 took 4+ years _after_ EC2 was launched to the public.
I'm curious, Dan: did *Jeff* truly originate within Amazon the ideas to rent platform capacity and decouple internal dependencies? I have no doubt he was a leader in realizing the business opportunities; perhaps I was mistaken in my belief others brought him the ideas.
this is categorically false. i wrote the press release with pinkham and dalzell championed the concept with jeff.
I hear this story a lot, but I don’t quite see how it works. Do you have a clause in the contract that they only get the VM Jan-Oct? Certainly modern AWS doesn’t. Who would build their business on such a back-end?
No, but spot instance prices used to move pretty wild in November/December.
It’s settled down quite a bit these days.
Werner Vogels mentioned multiple times that "renting out extra capacity" was not true. It matches with my experience too when I worked on S3 team which was one of the first aws product.
Either way nice thread!
Now imagine you make the whole world’s excess server capacity available for rent instead of just Amazon’s. @golemproject is doing this.
This one post gets me very ... confused. I’ve heard from others that AWS was started for other reasons, but NOT this.
However, those people I’m hearing from weren’t “in the room” with Jeff.
How can this be true, though? Excess server capacity 46 weeks out of the year, so you rent it out. Then during the holidays you shut off your AWS customers?
This excess capacity story was never true. It was actually about creating hardened interfaces between IT and engineers.
As long as the external demand is filling in troughs and the peaks are not perfectly correlated you will still get net efficiency gains.
was renting out this type of capacity common at the time or did that take some innovation in how that was structured as well? security/pricing/monitoring etc...
Hasn’t @Werner continuously debunked this story? AWS wasn’t built because Jeff saw a pile of unused or underused servers in the corner.
What the fuck are you talking about dan
No, there was zero capital available to companies like Amazon at that time. That's why so many of them went under!
to someone completely dumb about tech/hardware, would you kindly explain why linux/hp was 80% cheaper than Sun?
thx
I was at a team dinner with Grandinetti one night where he was telling the stories of his hail Mary efforts on a capital raise as the well was drying up. Fun story but intense time.
Inadvertently perfect typo.
"Vicious", not "viscous" meaning thick, syrupy, slow-flowing. But a very interesting thread - thank you for it.
How did engineers tolerate Linux servers after Sun? I mean starting development on Linux after Sun at that time was probably like getting from Mercedes to old track, no?
I don't know about Amazon, but in '96-97 the telecom I was working for was deploying mostly HP-UX, but the developers were all running Linux on their boxes and were sick of being told that they had to use this or that older version of Perl or whatnot because that was qualified...
You overestimate how “good” old Unix was. Old window managers. Old versions of software. Built some new servers using commodity software and early Redhat. Beat the pants off HPUX, Sun, DEC big iron boxes.
What a thread. Thanks for sharing 🙏
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dalzell was CIO. alv was CTO and lead S3.
Linux was released in 1991. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux
I guess maybe he meant Linux 1.0.0. But it's still just a meaningless version number.
It should also be noted that Rick is an awesome human being. Although I never got to work with him, our offices were near each other and he was such a nice guy. He bought some old Donkey Kong arcade machine on a lark one day and left it in the hallway. He was that kinda guy.
What was the thought process of behind this ?
I bought one on eBay and used it as a monitor stand!
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Can someone smart what Dan means by "sticky"?
get over yourself.
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Amazing and inspiring story. Thanks for sharing. This was probably the pivotal point in the beginning of the end for the once great Sun microsystems as well
Correct. One of the pivotal points for sure
how did switching to HP reduce capex 80% if Sun servers were selling @ 10 cents/$ from broke dot-coms? (I left Enron, which had warehouses of unused Sun servers)
Hell, in 99, Dell ran on Sun servers..
McNealy also became famous for this “what were you thinking” speech 🎤,
After the technology bubble popped back in 2000
Fascinating post about a pivotal time in the best business in America - sorry to detract but would love to hear @elonmusk’s story of summer of ‘19 one day, before they got it going to where we’re at now
I think it involved lying about robotaxis and FSD to raise capital and get production of model 3 going.
Seems like the world doesn’t care about lies and financial creativity anymore and is just juicing the stock to finance Elon’s plan to save our little planet with EVs and interplanetary travel
Seems like you have little understanding about Musk’s companies. Suggest you read Elon Musk’s biography.
I prefer reading tweets with my ADHD brain. What do you mean? Are they all fraudulent like my friend is suggesting?
Tweets can’t provide the depth of understanding as a book.
Alright I’ll dust off the book tonight. Never read it but you’re making me interested
Great thread.
Incredible story, a decision like that takes conviction.
How long do you think it took for the investment to break-even? Was the capex reduction that substantial compared to the engineering and product time lost?
I don't know precisely, but it was a massive reduction that paid off very quickly
Yes, but only in that it cut the cost of growth (and helped with GAAP-based financial results, but that was never an important metric). We continued to pay for the leases for the decommissioned servers for several years after the migration.
I remember visiting our Seattle data center at 2nd and Spring in 2002 (?) and there was a side room crammed full of the old de-racked DEC servers.
While true I would attribute it to the time then. In 1996 I started working in Cadence. Entire semicon world was Unix(Solaris, HPUX, IBM AIX). By 98/99 Linux came into the mix, then Windows NT. By 2003-04, Linux was dominant.
You say HP/Linux twice in the thread -- What's HP's role in this story? Just hardware suppliers, you didn't mix vendors or self-build?
HP was the commodity hardware provider
I love hearing the inside story of challenging and defining moments. Thanks!
Dan please write a book! :)
I’m fine with Twitter threads. :-)
super thread!
Amazing AWS story!
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this thread is riddled with errors and outright falsehoods.
correct
concretely?
Such as?
Love to hear your version for comparison!
Thanks
I’ve not been able to find a youtube link for the video, unfortunately. If anyone (@om ?) has a non-flash link I am happy to update the post.
Looks like it got lost in the shuttering of blip.tv. Here's where Om posts about it
GigaOM Interview: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos
Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos charmed everyone at this week’s D6 Conference with his optimism for Kindle, but I got him to talk about Amazon Web Services and his company’s efforts in cloud …
om.co
If so post a rebutted.
I'll love to hear yours
i love your threads. thanks for sharing
I was working at Digital in the NASDAQ group during that time. Tru 64 machines.
Cool thread!
Hey @denisehemke enjoy a good read... :-)
hunger makes superhuman. great story
No. The entire fleet was Compaq/Digital Tru64 Alpha servers in 2000 (and '99, and '98). Amazon did use Sun servers in the earliest days but a bad experience with Sun support caused us to switch vendors.
So did he say Sun just to make the story better?
( @PeterVosshall is worth listening to here )
Protip: There's always an element of myth-making in these sorts of stories. AWS founding stories are among them.
(Unrelated: I want to see a tweetstorm on Brazil and Apollo sometime. Those two platforms never get their dues )
Correct. And also imperfect memory from 20 years ago. I think the lesson is the same with some DEC servers thrown in, but I always want to know if I missed something important
And some #SUN servers thrown out 🤣
No, the story is good either way. Blame the engineer in me. That said, one of the bigger risks and challenges was that we had to migrate our software from 64-bit to 32. The safest way (in the short term) was to just let ints be ints. But we paid later when IDs overflowed...
So in that regard the story is better with DEC Alpha servers.
ultrasparc would have been well established at that point so it still works
I worked for Compaq then and remember the old DEC guys bragging about their large Amazon footprint. Of course old DEC guys bragged about lots of stuff.
...and they were usually right.
unless it involved DECnet, in which case they were just wrong.
DECnet is still the best link-layer protocol; if your physical layer is an old shoelace soaked in Gatorade or a chain of rusty paperclips.
well, ain't that some truth telling about DECnet. But let's also never forget the::way::to::address::email
At least it had a TTL field ...
Sorry about that, I guess. I'd be interested to know which ID's overflowed first. I doubt if ASIN's arrived in time to do that, which would mean user id's ? Also seems odd, 4B users is a lot. Orders used a UUID. So please do tell ....
Of course you ignore my little CORBA app that ran on one of the stray Sun machines and categorized emails. Thing ran for years untouched before someone discovered it during a data center move.
Oh, I wanna hear more about that story! And then try to forget (again) about CORBA 😀
You helped me with Tuxedo/WLE/m3 setup since we had to build it for Sun. It was like 30 lines of C++ wrapping some NLP library Customer Service had bought for email.
Ah, a great application of CORBA (for the time). It was so easy I forgot! Did it survive the data center move?
This article from 2002 confirms that:
“the big contract win came in May 2000, when HP announced its systems would replace Unix servers from Sun Microsystems”
How Linux saved Amazon millions
The e-tailer goes with the lower-cost operating system and cuts $17 million in tech expenses. This could be bad news for Microsoft's Windows if companies take this tack to cut costs.
cnet.com
Oracle machines may have been Sun, but the website and nascent services - the software we had to port - ran on DEC Alpha. The story references a 2000 article which is more correct (“Amazon's Web site currently is run chiefly on hardware from Sun Microsystems and Compaq”).
and we definitely didn't put launches on hold for over a year in that period. I have multiple launch memorabilia from things that went out then: Tools & Hardware, Kitchen, Wireless, the ECS REST APIs, lots of smaller ones.
The Digital Tru64 was gone in late 2000 when I got there and It was all HP LP6000 webservers on Linux. The Database servers were HP as well, with one superdome and a pile off other K/L/N class running the Oracle databases. Those were switched to Linux by 2003ish.
This is the stuff I’m here for
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Great stuff, lots of info right there
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The shift from Sun to Linux was really courages move at that stage!
Great post!
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Amazing story, thanks for sharing
So Dan. How do we play this in the markets?
this website is cursed; also, the best
This post remembered what Professor @AswathDamodaran said about AMZN a few months ago, survived not in spite of bubble bust but because of it since was forced to reduce fixed costs. Lesson learned.
Nice story. Was at Adobe during that time and similar experiences trying to rip out from closed systems. We had to go rogue as we couldn’t get backing/money. Post dotcom was hard.
Awesome thread man 👍
Muy buen hilo!!!
This is incredible. Thanks for sharing Dan.
Excellent thread thanks. Was the market aware if the transition and underlying bimpact on cost /updates it was ongoing? I was a public market investor and don't recall being aware. Thx again
Incredibly timely and interesting history, thanks!
Thank you for sharing and hiving glimpse into an amazing story of transformation
Amazing story Dan, thanks for sharing. Fuel for staying motivated and focused.
Sounds like Snowflake
Super interesting post!
unroll please
Whhuuuuutttt????!!!! 🤦🏾♂️
Ask.com (my first tech gig) went completely the opposite way and replaced our Sun Solaris servers with .... Windows 2000 servers. This even after we explained in great detail to management why Google was kicking our asses with their Linux config.
Ask.com - What's Your Question?
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AWS really was the embodiment of Scott Mcnealy’s vision in the 1990s.
Yup, I remember that.
“The network IS the computer”
Amazing story
Thank you, Dan, for sharing your story. Quite inspiring to make a decision with strong direction.
Rose colored glasses but OK.
good thread
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Thanks you for sharing it. People under estimate the value of crisis and hardships. With out those we cannot be what we are
Thank you
I worked @ Sun 1995-1998.
Sun introduced Java into the world & never monetized it.
My team built high-end 3D graphics capabilities to compete with Silicon Graphics (aka SGI).
At peak $SUNW, we considered acquiring Apple. So glad we didn’t.
That Sun campus is now Facebook HQ.
I agree, Sun was an awesome company and their products were ground breaking! This post is not meant as a dig on Sun at all. Just a history of what happened at Amazon
I’ll never forget the “Javavangelist” in my life at the time 🙄😆
This history is new to me. I was wondering why we are covering Sun Microsystems, Solaris OS Design in my operating systems class. Besides fundamentals of design, the history always helps to put bigger pictures in context.
Dan this is brilliant....thanks for taking time to write this down....
I'll always have a warm spot in my heart for Sun because of ZFS.
Did the same at Bosch in 2005. TCO of Sun servers for the workload we were using (car navigation data compiler pipeline) it for was unjustified.
This transition was a single big cost saving and future proofing.
I spent many hours on SGI Origin machines back in college doing early VR work in 2001-2003. That is where I was forced to learn Unix/linux. I built my inventor files and ran on SGI machines, then played in the lab with off the shelf computers and bios hacked Nvidia cards.
I wouldn't rate Sun 3D compared to SGI, arch was rubbish, stupidly expensive enormous bus vs switched fabric, just obsolete.
That makes me so sad that the Sun campus is now Facebook...
I worked for a NYC reseller of Netra servers and Apple at that time. Changed my email sig to “CHIME Welcome to Solaris”
I was w/ Sun UK then. You knew something was wrong with the company when guys in the office talked of buying an E10K (pricetag ~ 1mil) themselves to crest a bonus target.
I was a consultant for the biggest Nordic bank back then. I saw managed a Sun OS server with an uptime of over 1100 days. I was a die hard Linux fan. But that day it became clear Sun was the king among OS and servers. It was amazing how bad they ran their business. RIP SUN 🙌
Nobody ever beat SGI because they knew what they were doing and they were the best at it. The only thing they didn't know how to do was build an affordable computer and their CEO was clueless. And then there was a succession of CEO's that were even more clueless and corrupt.
Also, they had the best logo.
Great story
I'm the guy who (1) got httpd running on the first Sun servers at amzn (2) installed Slackware on "cc motel", an x86 network-free "server" (3) participated in the decision to use Oracle. This is a useful history, but maybe it should to back a few years :)
Slackware! Thank you for that dopamine hit of nostalgia
It's still going! I'm pretty sure it's the oldest distro of linux currently maintained!
I bought it on CD in the early 90s!
Damn I didn't even exist back then!
SLS and Yggdrassil (on a live CD even), oh the days!
1994 rawrite to floppy so I could install, then dual boot Slackware / Windows 3.11. Memories.
I was late to the game, had a 4-CD box of 7.1 in 2000. But that's how I learnt Linux. Man pages and HOWTOs.
I installed Slackware back 95 with a stack of floppies and was so happy :D
I rebuilt your ccmotel with an alphaserver. Did you setup a weird sun printserver running latex to print some sort of distribution center shipping docs?
Someone should do a pamphlet of the history of Amazon tech if only for the academic purpose of it.
Why the hell would you even get the idea to install "Slackware"? That's a hacker's, not a system engineer's mentality. I knew it.
Did you just say “Slackware”?! 🤟
Heh, another thought occurs to me. I suppose I could claim to be the person who introduced Linux to amzn as well as all the other random firsts I pulled off there. However, sometimes you do a thing too early for it to really count.
Where you the first to introduce Linux to amzn? If yes, then you are a legend.
God, I'm really feeling the "sometimes you do a thing too early for it to really count" vibes today
Thank you so much Dan for sharing this amazing story! Really helpful in thinking about today's tech landscape.
Awesome back stage scenes
Very nice reading on AWS evolution
I was at AMZN in 17. Bucks.
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Imagine a world where Amazon bought Sun versus Oracle, gaining control of Java, and IBM didn’t sell its global network to AT&T, maintaining control of a global cloud backbone. Could be a fun alternate cloud war reality, in cloud business history.
Wow, didn't know about IBM having a Network Backbone Business back then. Thanks for the history tidbit!
Odd. IBM then bought out Softlayer (previously ThePlanet), afaik softlayer just used other backbone providers and/or peering, doesnt seem like they made much of a dent against aws/gcp/azure, stuck with bare metal angle too long with poor cloud offering (same rackspace's inhouse)
And if everybody logged into workstations running a Xerox designed OS
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interesting thread
Dude, put this on a blog somewhere, please!
It’s amazing how Amazon converted every major expenses on their P&L into source of revenue. Capitalism at its finest.
Amazing story!
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Here you go, enjoy reading :)
threadsapp.page.link/j34Y
You were burning $1B/year on datacenter for an e-bookstore in 2000? You're lucky you weren't fired.
eBay's like yeah we just ran our shit on somebody's old PC hooked up under the desk.
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Awesome back story!
good story; only serves to remind me that C-level officer decisions don't mean jack shit unless you have a qualified, dedicated team to back them up and the actual work.
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Great read!
Wow this is pure gold! Thanks for sharing @DanRose999
Monthly BREAKOUTS in Nifty stocks
youtu.be/2YCUy5fay3U
Monopoly businesses you can own part 2
youtu.be/pIOD1TUrW4w
MONOPOLISTIC BUSINESSES ONE CAN OWN!!
youtu.be/Qz-Q4XZ1pXA
youtu.be/2g5CPWYLBVI
Stocks for positional trading
youtu.be/YsWmo-QhYKY
Imp levels
Very cool story / timeline of events . Thanks for sharing
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Huge fan of these threads, thanks @DanRose999 🙏✌️
Interesting thread, I was alway under the impression that Andy Jassy drove the birth of AWS more than Bezos. Is this wrong?
Andy played a huge role, but it was Jeff's brainchild. I'm pretty sure Andy would agree with that
I think your threads could easily be compiled into intriguing stories in a book. Would wait for this book whenever it comes.
Great story. Big decision can deliver exponential results, AMZN has delivered so much innovation!
Cool story , thanks for sharing
So you’re saying when we break up Amazon it makes sense to spin off AWS as a public utility?
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AWS
Amazon
Bellissimo racconto di come è nata AWS e sui pionieri del cloud
Sun Microsystems was so ingrained in the ISP I joined in 1996/7 that my desktop was a Sun Ultra PC.
Great story, thanks!
Amazing story!!
The eternal cycle of local versus distributed processing power
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Cheers for your hard work over the years! AWS is a great platform and very affordable, it's genuinely changed the way the web works, imo.
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we were running ebay on those e10Ks at the time
Wow.. Great story.
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Thank you for this 🙏
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Can only imagine! Our 4 person startup was spending so much on Sun machines in 2000 and then couldn’t get funding at the time, so we had to sell. Fast forward 20 years and I’ve resurrected a big chunk of it and server/storage costs are now next to nothing for almost the same biz!
I remember signing off a bill for 10’s of 000’s in late 90’s for servers/storage. My phone could probably do more today 😃 Progress is an amazing thing!
Anyone know what the equivalent cost constraint is for such firms today?
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Thanks for sharing. Brilliant Write up
Interesting stuff, the tide is turning now, lots of startup create their own 'datacenter' to avoid aws billing.
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fascinating back story
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you should write a book
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Sometimes it pays to switch to something cheaper and more scalable even if it hurts. A lot of parallels here between AWS switch to a Linux platform and the potential to move from a proprietary EHR to an #openehr @OxleasDigital
Interesting history @ari_pickar
Super interesting story.
I can't help to think that now Amazon takes an even larger cut of company's operating expenses than Sun ever did. And I don't think that it's worth it for most.
Awesome story Dan! Thanks for sharing! I think more engineer stories should be talked about, because it is rarely one man that builds a company (so often touted in the media) 🤓
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A nuvem antes da nuvem kkkk
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This is an amazing bit of history! Never let a good crisis go to waste. Really smart. No wonder the company is where it is! Well done and thanks for sharing!
Thanks for sharing this!
Thanks for sharing! 👏👏👏
Simply put...brilliant
How does this line up with Andy Jassy's interview referenced here?
How AWS came to be
There are lots of stories about the formation of AWS, but this much we know: 10 years ago, Amazon Web Services, the cloud Infrastructure as a Service arm of Amazon.com, was launched with little fanfare as a side business for Amazon.com. Today, it’s a highly successful company in its own right, riding a remarkable $10 billion […]
techcrunch.com
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Incredible story, thanks for sharing!
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Nice thread! Thanks for sharing!
good old Linux
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Amazing story!
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Awesome.
It’s a great night time story
Remarkable story, thanks for sharing sir...
There was time in Indian Telecom industry which started about a decade back when complete Mobility infrastructure was migrating from monolithic and TDM based architecture to All IP network...
then also, similar feelings were cropping up as Mr. Dan Rose mentioned... but yes, that was foundation of today's 4G and upcoming 5G and IOT network
Interesting thread. Thanks for sharing Dan!
I was in that old data centre. Good Times.
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Strange old world but was at Sony developing a new channel called eCommerce in 2001 when Euler Hermes ,trade credit insurers, would only give Amazon a 100k credit limit and that was after face to face debates
Which Linux Distribution did you use at that time and why did you choose it?
Linux is responsible then and RedHat?!
Dan - I know others have said it but this needs a book and a movie.. being in Industry myself for last 25 years, I completely relate to the power of Sun, IBM those days .. thanks for sharing!!
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Wow! What a story, I remember that epoch well #thx4memories #thx4sharing
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Fantastic thread. Thanks for sharing.
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Great story re. #transformation & being #bold In the 90’s it was all about resiliency & uptime. Evolution has taken the industry to more of a #QoS & #SpeedToValue approach with availability a given. Guess it wasn’t SUN servers but how the architecture was designed that was costly
Great thread. Interesting.
This is why whenever people grumble about Bezo's wealth, I say "he deserves every penny". Brilliant insight. Thank you
Great share. In a sea of @Twitter nonsense, an actually informative thread. 👏👏👏
Great thread
fascinating story..