EC2, also known as Elastic Compute Cloud, sits at the core of the Amazon Web Services Inc. platform, and the company is celebrating the technology’s 15th birthday this year. What many people may not know is that the original version of EC2 was built not in the United States, but in South Africa.

EC2, which allowed users to essentially rent computer space with the swipe of a credit card, launched the cloud juggernaut that became AWS. It was developed and led by an engineer in Amazon’s satellite development office in Cape Town. The goal was to create a service that would not only help deploy Amazon’s infrastructure, but support developers as well.

When Amazon founder and former Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos delivered a keynote talk at an MIT conference on Sept. 27, 2006, he announced EC2 to the world. This became the central focus of a blog post later that day by Jeff Barr, technical evangelist for AWS, titled “We Build Muck, So You Don’t Have To.”

AWS has planned a two-day live virtual celebration of EC2, featuring sessions with AWS experts, industry leaders, customers and partners who will discuss 15 years of EC2, what’s next for EC2 as its Classic iteration is retired later this year, and what the next decade may bring. The two-day event begins at 9 a.m. PDT on Aug. 23.

TheCUBE’s, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, coverage of the “Amazon EC2 15th Birthday Event” will include interviews with AWS’ Sandy Carter, vice president of worldwide public sector partners and programs; Raj Pai, vice president of EC2 product management; and Joshua Burgin, general manager of AWS Outpost. (* Disclosure below.)

Robust instances

AWS has built a lot of services around EC2 in the years since the technology’s launch. There is now a significant number of instance types available for EC2 users, organized into eight families and ranging from compute, memory or storage-optimized to performance measurement and accelerated computing.

In an exclusive interview with SiliconANGLE’s John Furrier, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, newly elevated to the chief executive position from his former role leading AWS, noted that the company had been following a deliberate game plan to build a strong instance portfolio. This will also become a significant factor as AWS continues to expand its internal processor development effort.

“We have an unmatched array of instances, not just the number of instances, but just if you look at the detail,” Jassy said. “We have the fastest networking instances with 400 gigabit-per-second capabilities and the largest high-memory instances of 24 terabytes, the largest storage instances. We’ve got the most powerful machine learning training in instances and the most powerful inference instances. One of the things that our customers are really excited about, and it’s changing the way they think about compute on the instance side, is the Graviton2 chips that we have built and launched in our families, like our R6G and M6G and T4G.”

Leveraging Outposts

While the development of powerful instances has played a key role in the popularity of EC2, AWS has also followed a strategy to build bridges to the elastic compute cloud side from a number of its central offerings.

This can be seen in the firm’s ongoing deployment of AWS Outposts, a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure to any datacenter or colocation space. When Outposts was officially launched in 2019, AWS made it clear that its EC2 cloud instances would be offered on-premises as well.

This has proven to be an attractive option in the telecommunications world, according to one industry analyst. The ability to link on-premises operations with EC2 instances has brought the telco industry more fully into the hyperscaler space and provided attractive options for edge deployment.

“AWS Outposts are on-premises, but they are tied back to AWS EC2 and the regional cloud for management and control,” Roy Chua, founder and principal of AvidThink, said in an interview with theCUBE. “Another trend is to use AWS Outposts for edge computing coupled with a telco-managed private 5G or 4G LTE network.”

Catalyst for innovation

Over the decades of technology development there have been a number of seminal moments when the opportunities presented by a new product or service set off a cascade of innovation. The introduction of the personal computer was one such event. The launch of the first iPhone was another.

A case could easily be made that the unveiling of EC2 ranks up there as well. Not only has AWS ridden EC2 to the top of the public cloud world, but it has spawned entire billion-dollar businesses, such as Snowflake Inc., which built highly successful models on the AWS platform.

“I used to work at a company where we used AWS EC2 in its earliest days,” Chua recalled. “A swipe of a credit card and a few minutes later we had a server in the cloud. We thought that was pretty cool, and the developers embraced that concept.”

Livestream of Amazon EC2 15th Birthday Event

The Amazon EC2 15th Birthday Event is a livestream event that will be featured on the AWS channel on Twitch, with additional interviews to be broadcasted on theCUBE. You can register for free here to access the live event. Plus, you can watch theCUBE interviews here on demand after the live event.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch the coverage of the Amazon EC2 15th Birthday Event, including on the AWS channel on Twitch and on theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel.

TheCUBE Insights podcast

SiliconANGLE also has podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify, which you can enjoy while on the go.

Guests who will be interviewed on theCUBE during the Amazon EC2 15th Birthday Event include AWS’ Sandy Carter, vice president of worldwide public sector partners and programs; Raj Pai, VP of EC2 product management; and Joshua Burgin, GM of AWS Outposts.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Amazon EC2 15th Birthday Event. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the  sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image: SiliconANGLE

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