The South African who built the R1.7 trillion Amazon Web Services giant

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s largest cloud computing platform, operating in 33 geographical regions and serving 245 countries and territories.

Its most recent revenue figure for the financial year ending March 2024 was $91 billion (R1.7 trillion), 16% of Amazon’s total revenue.

However, what is most impressive about AWS from a South African point of view is that the cloud platform was built by a local — in a house in Llandudno, Cape Town.

AWS’s journey started in the US in 2000, when Amazon realised that adding new features to one of the world’s biggest websites at the time was frustratingly slow.

This was because it took software engineers 70% of the time to lay down the essential elements for each project or upgrade. The most important of these elements were a storage system, databases, and computing infrastructure.

AWS CEO Andy Jassy, who was Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ chief of staff at the time, said they realised it would help to create common infrastructure services to remove duplication when building new applications.

The idea was essentially an internal “cloud”.

Amazon noticed that other developers were experiencing the same problem when using their embedded links to list Amazon products on affiliate websites.

The e-commerce platform then introduced a building block feature that saved developers from having to build separate resources. Instead, they could embed Amazon features directly into their site.

This turned out to be a proof of concept for their common infrastructure services.

Amazon started building this shared infrastructure platform, and in July 2002, it launched its first web services. It also opened the Amazon.com platform to all developers.

These new web services were a hit. By 2004, over 100 applications were built on top of the platform. This surprised Amazon and encouraged them to invest more in the project.

Enter South African Internet pioneer Chris Pinkham.

Before joining Amazon in 2000 to run its network engineering department, Pinkham started South Africa’s first ISP, The Internetworking Company of Southern Africa (Ticsa), in 1993.

Ticsa was sold to UUNET in 1996, which saw Pinkham take a break from the tech world until joining Amazon. During this sabbatical, he devoted time to one of his hobbies and sailed around the world.

In late 2003, Pinkham and his colleague Benjamin Black presented an internal paper that shared a vision for Amazon’s retail computing infrastructure.

The vision was to create a standardised and automated platform that would partly rely on Amazon’s web services, which were already in the works.

This would allow Amazon to generate revenue from its infrastructural investment by selling access to these virtual servers as a service.

Pinkham, who was based in Seattle at the time, wanted to move back to Cape Town. However, Jeff Bezos wanted to keep him on. This ultimately led to a discussion about the computing service.

“He asked if I would look into this computing service, which was Amazon’s goal at some point in the future,” Pinkham said.

“The project was un-staffed and undefined, so with some of the folks that I worked with in Seattle, we put together a proposal which described in very rudimentary terms the first compute service – the elastic compute cloud.”

Bezos allowed Pinkham to return to Cape Town, and the South African put his team together.

Pinkham’s team, consisting of local engineers and lead developer Christopher Brown, started in a house in Llandudno before moving to an office in Constantia.

It was there, in an office full of patio furniture, that Pinkham and his team built the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

In Brad Stone’s book The Everything Store, which documents the rise of Amazon in the 1990s, Pinkham said this isolation was beneficial as it allowed him to stay away from Bezos.

He said this was not because he disliked the then-CEO but rather because “you did not want to become his pet project,” Pinkham said. “He would love it to distraction.”

Amazon EC2 was officially launched in August 2006.

Today, EC2 offers nearly 400 instance types across Amazon Web Services’ 24 regions and 77 availability zones globally.

There is a choice between Intel, AMD, and Arm-based processors, and it is the only major cloud provider that supports MacOS.

After leaving Amazon in 2006, Pinkham co-founded Nimbula with Willem van Biljon. Nimbula developed software that made it easier for businesses to build and deploy infrastructure as a service similar to EC2.

Once Oracle acquired Nimbula in 2013, Pinkham continued working for the cloud computing business for another year before being appointed as the VP of engineering at Twitter for two years.

Today, Pinkham serves as an independent director on the board of Cape Town-based financial services company Jumo and remains an avid sailor when not immersed in the world of technology.