How a video-game inspired the Amazon Cloud

Good ideas often come from good reading.

In 2003 Steve Grand, the developer of a video game called Creatures, wrote a book on Creation describing his personal journey in the game development. Creatures allowed players to guide seemingly intelligent creatures on their computer screens. He wrote that his approach to create intelligent life was to focus on designing simple computational building blocks, and then sit back and watch surprising behaviors emerge. Grand called the organisms Primitives. As well as organisms are built from genetic building blocks, sophisticated artificial intelligence can emerge from cybernetic primitive computational rules.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com fell in love with the book and decided that he wanted to test Grand’s idea of Primitives. Bezos directed some of his engineers in brainstorming possible Primitives. Storage, bandwidth, messaging, payments and processing made the list.

Bezos became particularly interested in storage services, which later was developed with the vision of enabling developers and companies to use web services to build sophisticated and scalable applications. He tried to imagine a student in a dorm room who would have at her disposal the same infrastructure as a large corporation and a service that could level the playing field for large and small companies.

Amazon’s vision was that of providing web services in a similar way as an electric utility allows customers to pay only for the electricity they use. And the rates would have to be cheap in order to beat high margin competitors like Google or IBM who traditionally cared more about having high margins. Two years later, the founders of virtually every start up were using Amazon web services due to its reliability and low prices.

Just like in the book Creation, Amazon Web Services ended within a couple of years and many hours of development by its engineers in providing storage and computer so cheaply to small companies that created an evolution of creatures, in this case, start ups and small businesses.

Startups no longer needed to spend their money on buying servers and hiring specialized engineers to run them. Infrastructure costs were variable instead of fixed, and they could grow in direct proportion to revenues. It freed companies to experiment, to change their businesses models with a minimum of pain, and to keep up with the rapidly growing audiences of erupting social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Amazon outflanked great hardware makers of the time like sun Microsystems and Hewlett Packard and defined the next wave of corporate computing. Amazon Global Services is now a $10 billion business per year leaving far behind its largest competitors.

And it all started with a videogame.