CEO Andy Jassy’s 2025 Letter to Shareholders – About Amazon
AWS followed lots of squiggly lines, too. The original vision included storage, compute, payments, and human intelligence. Some of those (e.g. storage and compute) became lynchpins in AWS. Others didn’t succeed. We didn’t initially plan a database service; and when we built one, our first attempt failed to get traction. We went back to the drawing board and built new relational and non-relational database services, which have resonated well and become core to millions of AWS applications. When we launched EC2 (our compute service), it was a single instance type in one availability zone, Linux-only, with no auto-scaling, load balancing, block storage, or private networking. Over time, we added those capabilities and hundreds more services. AWS was initially attractive to start-ups (companies like DoorDash, Dropbox, Pinterest, Slack, and Stripe were among many that built their businesses on AWS). Pundits said enterprises and governments would never use cloud or AWS for anything substantive. In 2008, Netflix decided to move all of its applications to AWS, then came big commitments from GE, Intuit, and others—and eventually the CIA chose AWS as their partner to build their classified cloud. Growth came fast and furious, and as it accelerated, so too did our capital expenditures (“capex”) with dilutive impact on free cash flow (“FCF”). At our 2014 AWS operating plan review, the discussion started with a senior leader at the company musing, “Tell me again why we’re doing this business?”
