It is tempting to date cloud computing from the launch of Amazon S3 in 2006 and the rise of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) that followed. That was certainly the moment the market changed in a visible, irreversible way. But the truth is that cloud began earlier, in the 1990s, when software as a service (SaaS), application hosting, managed services providers, and various forms of remote subscription computing started to reshape how enterprises thought about owning and operating technology. Even then, the core value proposition was familiar: Let someone else run the infrastructure, abstract the complexity, deliver capability as a service, and allow the business to consume only what it needs.

What AWS changed was the scale, accessibility, and precision of the execution. Amazon turned infrastructure into a programmable utility. It made compute and storage available in ways that were elastic, self-service, API-driven, and globally reachable. That was the breakthrough. Enterprises had outsourced pieces of technology before, but now they could rent raw infrastructure with unprecedented speed and flexibility. The launch of Amazon S3 was especially important because it provided a durable, scalable storage foundation that became one of the building blocks for modern digital business.