Foreword

Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s I worked in the rank and file of system administrators endeavoring to keep network services online, secure, and available to users. At the time, administration was a tedious, onerous affair involving cable slinging, server racking, installing from optical media, and configuring software manually. It was thankless work, often an exercise in frustration, requiring patience, persistence, and plenty of caffeine. To participate in the emerging online marketplace, businesses of the era bore the burden of managing this physical infrastructure, accepting the associated capital and operating costs and hoping for enough success to justify those expenses.

When Amazon Web Services emerged in 2006, it signaled a shift in the industry. Management of compute and storage resources was dramatically simplified, and the cost of building and launching applications plummeted. Suddenly anyone with a good idea and the ability to execute could build a global business on world-class infrastructure at a starting cost of just a few cents an hour. The AWS value proposition was immediately apparent, ushering in a wave of new startups, data center migrations, and third-party service providers. In terms of cumulative disruption of an established market, a few technologies stand above all others, and AWS is among them.