Disruptive innovations - AWS Cloud

Amazon Web Service (AWS) started it's journey as an online bookseller way back in 1996. Amazons online business model was a completely new concept. Its business model gave birth to a new type of industry itself. As an online bookseller, they achieved tremendous success. It was its own business that outstripped the capability of all the existing software and could not scale any more. Considering its growth, they wanted a kind of IT infrastructure that could scale based on the requirements, while maintaining its system and application performance.

It is surprising to see how Amazon became one of the leading cloud provider of the time. Around 2000 to 2002, they felt that everything that could be done in the software to optimize its applications and business logic had reached its peak and their complex pieces of software could not evolve anymore. They went through serious introspection and concluded that a service-oriented architecture would give them a level of isolation to build software components rapidly and independently. Service-oriented architectures is what they used internally for all its purposes, and they thought to commercialize that self-service platform for the benefit of the world, as they knew that there are many out there facing the same challenges as they had. So, in 2006, they launched Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Behind Amazon's successful evolution from a retailer to a technology platform is its service-oriented architecture (SOA), which broke new technological grounds and proved that SOAs can deliver on their promises.

When you look at the size of the cloud market, it is astonishing that AWS is the undisputed leader and will probably be so for the foreseeable future. You may wonder how AWS built such a dominance in the market. Well, this is a classic case of disruption dynamics. In the early days, when AWS thought that service-oriented architecture was the solution largely needed in the industry, they did not have any support from other big players sitting across the lake, so the big IT giants stayed away from the idea that Amazon wanted to pursue. This gave AWS almost 6 to 7 years' head start to be ahead in the game. Now, other cloud players have a lot more work to do to catch up with the amount of pure functionality that AWS offers to its customers and which they are adding to on a regular basis.