How AWS came to be
Would add two points:<p>1. Internal Jeff Bezos memo from around 2002 that everything should be a web service, which eventually can be externalize: <a href="http://apievangelist.com/2012/01/12/the-secret-to-amazons-success-internal-apis/" rel="nofollow">http://apievangelist.com/2012/01/12/the-secret-to-amazons-su...</a><p>"Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.  Thank you; have a nice day!"<p>2. AWS started in 2006 with EC2 (provision service through API) and S3 (some file storage). Simple, but primitive building blocks.<p>Google entered game early in 2008 with App Engine. Very powerful, but restricted Platform as a Service. It pretty much requires to rewrite whole application from scratch and doesn't let you do tons of stuff.<p>Eventually AWS is keep adding services with more functionality (SimpleDB, DynamoDB, SQS), while it took quite a while Google to realize that it needs to provide bare servers too. So both approaches converge, but Amazon capture magnitude more revenues from cloud infrastructure.