Too Long; Didn't Read
What began as a simple online <a href="https://hackernoon.com/tagged/bookstore" target="_blank">bookstore</a> in the home of now-famous Jeff Bezos, Amazon has grown at an astounding pace to be the world’s largest retailer, topping even Walmart’s market cap (Amazon and Walmart at $366.08B and $227.43B respectively). Even more eye-opening is Amazon’s engine of growth for the past five years: the suite of developer and enterprise tools in the <a href="https://hackernoon.com/tagged/cloud" target="_blank">cloud</a> titled Amazon Web Services (commonly referred to as “AWS”). Today, analysts estimate AWS to account for approximately $160 billion in Amazon’s market cap, according to a note by Deutche Bank. At the core of its value proposition are two axioms: AWS is exponentially cheaper than one building and maintaining a proprietary server and is the definition of scalable because of its pay-as-you-go model.