AWS, the Birth of the Cloud

Medium

Using third parties as a quality benchmark is a very interesting strategy. When you develop products and services internally, thinking of them as if they were going to be offered to third parties is a way of preparing them to be very competitive, because in internal use, on many occasions, we accept standards that would not necessarily be competitive in a hypothetical open market in which we are forced to compete with competitors. The same approach helps us when we need to keep the service competitive in a rapidly evolving market: the arrival of Amazon Web Services was a revolution that gave rise to cloud computing and what we might call chewing gum infrastructures that allowed payment based on real use. Amazon may not have invented” cloud computing as such, but it did largely make it the ubiquitous service we know. Its market leadership has a lot to do with the idea of designing a competitive product for use by the company itself, whose demands were far above those of the average customer at the time.