In the early days of Amazon Web Services, technical evangelist Jeff Barr was putting in long hours on the road, pitching a novel concept: rent computing power for 10 cents an hour, and storage for 15 cents a gigabyte per month — no servers to buy, no data centers to build.
Barr remembers calling his wife to check in at the end of the day. Get a nice dinner, she told him, you deserve it. But later, at the restaurant, looking at the menu and doing the math in his head, he couldn’t help but ask himself if the pennies were adding up.
“Did enough people start using these servers to buy me a decent steak?” he wondered.
He probably should have ordered the filet.
Two decades later, AWS generates nearly $129 billion a year in revenue. That’s enough to rank in the top 40 of the Fortune 500 if it…
