How Amazon's Cloud took the world by storm

AWS has become the ultimate case study in corporate innovation.

- By Geoff Colvin

If you have touched your phone or computer today, you very likely have been touched by a vast business few outside the technology world are aware of. Maybe you've checked the Wall Street Journal or MarketWatch, traded a stock on Robinhood, bet on a football game through DraftKings, or posted on Pinterest or Yelp; ordered treats for Fido on Chewy or treats for yourself on DoorDash; submitted an expense report on Workday or made plans for the evening via Tinder, OkCupid, or Hinge.

If so, you did it with the help of Amazon Web Services. The less glamorous sibling to Amazon's operations in ecommerce, streaming video, and smart devices, AWS is no less ubiquitous, deploying millions of computers worldwide, humming away somewhere in the cloud.

For all those AWS customers the on-demand cloud computing platform isn’t just another vendor. They rely on it so heavily that it resembles a public utility—taken for granted, but essential to keep the machinery humming.

In the past 12 months each of the companies mentioned above has stated in Securities and Exchange Commission filings that they would be adversely impacted” if they lost their AWS service. Hundreds more companies—Netflix, Zoom, Intuit, Caesars Entertainment—have reported the same risk factor to the SEC in the past year. By the way, the SEC uses AWS. So does Fortune.)