Technology History | Pacific Tower — Fifteen Racks, One Paragraph, and the Cloud

Amazon Simple Storage Service went live on 14 March 2006 with a one-paragraph notice on a product page. No demo, no launch event. AWS's own twentieth-anniversary account gives the opening scale: about one petabyte of capacity across roughly 400 storage nodes in 15 racks in three data centres, with 15 Gbps of bandwidth in total. Storage cost 15 cents per gigabyte a month, and no single stored object could exceed 5 GB. The company that shipped it had its headquarters in this building, a 16-storey Art Deco tower on Beacon Hill that was built as a hospital. It opened in 1933 as a U.S. Marine Hospital treating merchant seamen, and it sits on the National Register of Historic Places. A developer converted the wards to offices and subleased them to Amazon in 1998; the hospital authority that owns the campus records the company holding 190,000 square feet here, until a move to South Lake Union that accounts date to either 2010 or 2011. Calling 14 March 2006 the start of Amazon Web Services is shorthand rather than fact. Simple Queue Service had been available since 2004. The compute half arrived on 25 August 2006, when EC2 opened in limited beta — and EC2 was not built here. Chris Pinkham, who ran Amazon's network engineering, wanted to move home to South Africa, so the company opened an engineering office for him instead and let him hire in Cape Town from around December 2004. His team, with lead developer Christopher Brown and later Willem van Biljon, started in a house in Llandudno and moved into a rented office in Constantia, where they stood in for a data centre rack with a pile of laptops in the corner of the room. Pinkham has since said the distance from Seattle helped, because a project that caught Bezos's full attention got more of it than it could absorb. S3 and EC2 shipped five months apart, one announced from a former hospital and one written 10,000 miles from it. The building is now called Pacific Tower. Its lower floors still run as a medical clinic, Washington State holds a 30-year lease on 13 floors, and Seattle Central College trains health workers in six of them. Photo: Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons