u/jeffbarr

My colleagues in the AWS Network Product Lab in Cupertino are tasked with inventing the most advanced networking technology in the world, while also inventing new ways to stress and break it.

With AWS operations in 240 countries and territories, the network includes about 20 million miles of fiber optic cable. We have doubled our total network capacity in the past three years and plan to double it again by 2027.

To learn more about this team and their work, read Inside the AWS lab that makes everything you do online feel effortless.

Twenty years ago today I was vacationing in Cabo San Lucas with my family when word came through that it was finally time to open up the Amazon EC2 beta. I spent several hours poolside polishing up my draft blog post on the resort's Wi-Fi and pushed it live as soon as I got the go-ahead.

Reading that original post I am struck by just how much the EC2 team was able to get right, and how the results of so many difficult decisions were reflected in my post. From the very concept of pay-as-you-go on-demand computing with billing by the hour, prebuilt machine images (AMIs), direct fast-path access to Amazon S3, and much more.

I am also struck by the fact that we confidently launched with just enough features to allow developers to get started. It would be a while before we introduced important concepts like Regions and Availability Zones, or important features like EBS, CloudWatch, Elastic Load Balancing, VPCs, visual tools (ElasticFox and then the AWS Management Console) and the like.

As you can see from the image above, the original API was small yet powerful -- just enough to let you get started on your cloud computing journey.

Early bird pricing for re:Invent 2026 is now open. You can save $1,200 by registering before August 26th at https://aws.amazon.com/events/reinvent/ .

There will be more developer sessions than ever, including new 500-level deep dives for advanced practitioners.

See you in Vegas in 166 days!