We Were Born a Month Apart: Twenty Years of AWS

On March 14, 2006, a small storage service called S3 went live. Nobody outside a few rooms knew what it would become. A month later, on April 14, I was born.

On March 19, 2026, AWS announced it had turned twenty. Its 240-plus services now sit beneath much of the internet, and it has published more than 4,700 blog posts along the way. Twenty years is a long time for anything in technology. For me, it’s been my whole life so far, minus one month.

We grew up at the same pace. I’m not sure AWS was ever just a product. It was a bet that computing power could be rented like electricity, that a startup in a garage could use the same infrastructure as a bank. That bet has become the floor much of the modern world stands on.

For nine years, AWS kept its numbers mostly hidden, folded into a category called “other” Then, in April 2015, Amazon broke it out for the first time. AWS had earned $1.57 billion in the first quarter, up 49 percent, with $265 million in operating income. Jeff Bezos called it “a $5 billion business,” and said it was “accelerating” That was the week I turned nine. I was learning to read and had no idea what a cloud was. A business I would one day study was taking its first public shape.

Eleven years later, the scale is hard to picture. In the second quarter of 2026, AWS earned $42.2 billion, growing 37 percent, its fastest pace in 18 quarters. Operating income reached $16.6 billion, at a margin of roughly 39 percent, up from about 17 percent in 2015. Quarterly revenue is now about 27 times what it was in that first disclosed quarter, and profit more than 60 times larger.

The numbers matter, but the story is in the choices. Every line on those charts was built by people who decided, on ordinary days, to keep going: to build the next service, to lower the next price, to bet on the next wave, from storage and servers to AI.

I was born into a world where the cloud was a rumor. I’m building in a world where it’s the ground beneath everything. I didn’t shape any of that, but I’ve grown up alongside it, and I want to celebrate it from that angle: a witness who started at the same time, still learning what twenty years of compounding looks like up close.

Happy 20th birthday, AWS.