Our AWS primitive services were designed from the start to be different. They offered important, highly flexible, but focused functionality. For instance, our first major primitive was Amazon Simple Storage Service (“S3”) in March 2006 that aimed to provide highly secure object storage, at very high durability and availability, at Internet scale, and very low cost. In other words, be stellar at object storage. When we launched S3, developers were excited, and a bit mystified. It was a very useful primitive service, but they wondered, why just object storage? When we launched Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (“EC2”) in August 2006 and Amazon SimpleDB in 2007, people realized we were building a set of primitive infrastructure services that would allow them to build anything they could imagine, much faster, more cost-effectively, and without having to manage or lay out capital upfront for the datacenter or hardware. As AWS unveiled these building blocks over time (we now have over 240 at builders’ disposal—meaningfully more than any other provider), whole companies sprang up quickly on top of AWS (e.g. Airbnb, Dropbox, Instagram, Pinterest, Stripe, etc.), industries reinvented themselves on AWS (e.g. streaming with Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Max, Fox, Paramount), and even critical government agencies switched to AWS (e.g. CIA, along with several other U.S. Intelligence agencies). But, one of the lesser-recognized beneficiaries was Amazon’s own consumer businesses, which innovated at dramatic speed across retail, advertising, devices (e.g. Alexa and Fire TV), Prime Video and Music, Amazon Go, Drones, and many other endeavors by leveraging the speed with which AWS let them build. Primitives, done well, rapidly accelerate builders’ ability to innovate.